


Peter Gets Rescued

by SubverbalDreams



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, By about 2 years, Good Guy Tony, Guilt, Hurt Peter Parker, I Do What I Want (TM), I did it again GDI this is going to be a novel, I tagged for the bad things but there’s also humor, M/M, Multiverse, Panic Attacks, Past Rape/Non-con, Peter Parker Has Panic Attacks, Peter is supported and loved, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protector to friends to lovers, Psychological Trauma, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self Harm, Starker, Tony and Peter eventually get together but it will be a few years down the road, Tony to the rescue, and Peter will initiate, and a dog, canon is my bitch, he is the very best and will live happily forever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-03-08 09:46:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18892132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SubverbalDreams/pseuds/SubverbalDreams
Summary: Peter Parker has gone missing and it's up to Tony to find him.What Tony doesn't realize is that he's got a lot of help.*****(Be prepared for intense emotions and triggers in the first few chapters; heed the tags)





	1. Avenging Angel (aka Tony Wrecks Shit)

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I've named Aunt May "Mae Taravelli" because in this AU she is not biologically related to Peter (she was his foster parent), and the movie actress looks more like a "Mae" to me.
> 
> 2\. All timelines and canon are used loosely. A "loose canon," one might say. (I'll show myself out)
> 
> 3\. This is a Rescue Fantasy (TM) 
> 
> 4\. **READ THIS FIRST: There is a part in Chapter 1 (I kept it to about a paragraph) where Peter is being raped. It is not explicit and it’s over fast, but it might be disturbing for some.** The stuff with Tony will be in the future, story-time wise, after Peter’s in college and over 18, and it will be consensual.
> 
> 5\. Yes, it's eventually gonna be a Tony/Peter pairing (AFTER Peter gets better & is an adult) because it makes me happy to think about them in a loving, nerdy, romantic relationship that (bonus) freaks out their friends.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon commenter O.O said it best:
> 
> COME ON TONY GET HIM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This felt awesome to write, especially after the chest pains I got from writing "Captured."
> 
>  **WARNING** please mind your triggers. This chapter has a brief rape scene (swiftly followed by vengeful justice), and Pete’s in really bad shape.

 

“Just fucking _FIND HIM!”_

Tony was not a man of even temper. Nor was he a man of patience. Everyone in the room flinched except Rhodey.

“They’re looking, Tones.” Rhodey’s calming voice did the absolute opposite.

Tony tried to push the desk over, remembered too late that it was bolted to the floor. Rhodey raised his eyebrows. Tony grabbed the computer tower and threw it, instead. It landed with a satisfying crash.

Happy turtled down into his own jacket collar. The two other assistants Tony had called in, they cowered to an appropriate degree.

Rhodey just shook his head.

“This is _absurd,”_ Tony snarled. “He finished the last semester of school. How can _no one_ have noticed he wasn’t living with Mae anymore? Don’t schools track this shit?!”

“Look,” Rhodey said, “we should call Mae back. Ask her what were his favorite hangouts, maybe she knows some of his friends—”

“Mae Taravelli has not heard from or seen Peter since the cops raided her place,” Tony spat. “And just how in the _fuck_ did I not know the _instant_ that happened? _Happy?”_

Happy, who looked decidedly haggard at the moment, said a hasty goodbye and hung up his phone. He turned agonized eyes to Tony, but Rhodey caught his gaze and held up an _“I’ll deal with this”_ hand.

“Obviously, someone has been keeping this on blackout. It’s only been two days. We’ll find him.” His hand came to rest on Tony’s shoulder. Tony froze beneath the touch, but he didn’t pull away.

_“Only” two days._ A lot of shit could happen in two days. They’d destroyed Sokovia in the span of _“only”_ a few hours. And it was only two days since they’d realized the tracking chip on the Spider-Suit had been showing the same location in Queens for a week, and when they traced that down, realized nothing was there.

Two days since they’d looked at Peter’s texts and realized they had been on repeat for a month. Two days since finding out the number itself had been disconnected and no one had a fucking clue _where_ those texts were being sent from.

He was supposed to be looking out for Peter. The kid was a fucking puppy, for chrissakes. An earnest little puppy with more brains and strength than common sense and a ridiculous need to please. Tony had spent the last two days with no sleep and too much spiked coffee. He’d read and re-read every overeager text Peter had sent to Happy’s phone in the last year.

_I stopped a purse snatcher today_

_So these guys were hurting a girl behind a club, I stuck them to the wall and stayed until the police came. It was on the news! :):)_

_Studying tonight but I’ll be on patrol this weekend! :D LMK if you need help with anything_

Rhodey was spouting some bullshit in a soothing voice. Tony shook off his hand, ran agitated fingers through his hair. He started ticking off points. He’d been over it fifty thousand times in the last two days, but he had to do _something._

“So Mae’s boyfriend was dealing coke. Not her fault. She didn’t know. But next thing we know, Peter’s taken away _‘for his own good’_ and winds up in stasis for a few days, then books it.

“The cops _don’t_ run him down, even though they could _easily_ pick him up at school, which he keeps going to like the—” _brilliant, talented, dedicated, precious_ “—complete _idiot_ he is.”

“Maybe it slipped through the cracks.” Rhodey didn’t sound like he believed that bullshit any more than Tony did.

“Oh! You mean, the way his entire legal record slipped through the cracks? The way nothing comes up about him on an internet search anymore? Or how about him withdrawing from high school two weeks after the last semester ended and _no one remembers_ how _that_ happened?! The way he’s fallen off the face of the earth?”

When he glanced at Rhodey again, his friend’s eyes had gone hollow. And Tony absolutely couldn’t stand that, because it said this was a lost cause.

Peter couldn’t be dead. There was no way he was dead. Tony had killed a lot of people in his day—a haunting number of those had been collateral damage—but if he found out he’d killed Peter Parker by not returning the kid’s stupid, chipper text messages…

_Can’t think about that._

He had work to do.

He had to _find Peter._

 

—

 

Day Three: 06:00 hours

 

Rhodey was starting to look as washed-out as Tony felt. It was Tony’s third day with no sleep. He was slightly drunk and hungover all at the same time.

Rhodey argued that he needed his wits. Tony responded that he had wits to spare.

“We could get _her_ involved,” Rhodey said at last. He sounded wiped out. “She’s got connections we don’t.”

_“NO.”_

Tony glared up at his friend. He was not going to pull in Black Widow. He was _not_ going to pick up Steve-douchebag-Rogers’ toy phone and ask if he could please hand it to the _other_ traitor so she could do him a solid.

Peter was his responsibility.

Peter was _his—_

And he’d blown it. He’d fucking blown it, just like he knew he would from the moment he looked into those puppy dog brown eyes.

_That’s why I never messaged you back. You get that, right? You’re a genius. Maybe even smarter than me._

_I know you’ll figure it out. That I’m a shit stain and you’re too pure to be in the same room with me. That dear GOD I should not be a role model of any kind._

_That I love you in my own pathetic way._

“That thing giving you trouble, Tony?” Rhodey asked, casting a concerned gaze at Tony’s chest. Tony had his hand up under his shirt, where he’d been obsessively scratching the skin around the arc reactor for the last few days. Had scratched himself bloody, but Rhodey didn’t need to know that.

“It’s fine,” he grunted. “Friday, what’s the six on the traffic cams?”

“Facial recognition search in Queens is seventy-one percent complete, boss. Nothing, yet.”

_Scratch. Scratch._ His fucking chest hurt. Like his heart was being clamped in a vise and squeezed.

“Friday, order me up another Irish coffee.”

“You got it, boss.”

_“Eat_ something, Tony,” Rhodey said.

“Friday, put extra cream in it.”

“Can do, boss.”

Rhodey closed his eyes.

“Don’t you not-look at me in that tone of voice,” Tony muttered.

“You’re gonna be useless if you don’t eat,” Rhodey said, not buying into Tony’s bullshit. “Friday, bring this skinny-ass boy a sandwich.”

“Sure thing, sidekick,” Friday chirped.

“...Sidekick,” Rhodey repeated, dead-pan. “You’re a dick, you know that?”

Tony hummed. “Ah. Yeah. Fully aware. Can we get back to work?”

Rhodey mumbled something, but he turned back to his computer.

Smart sidekick.

 

—

 

Day Three: 22:08 hours

 

_Hey._

_Hey, Tony._

_“Tony.”_ Rhodey’s voice.

“Wake up, man. We got a ping.”

Tony jerked his head off his arms like he’d been electrocuted. His “coffee” mug crashed off the table and shattered.

_“What? Where?”_ He rubbed his eyes, forgot he was still wearing the sunglasses and rubbed them right off his face. They clattered onto the table.

“Brooklyn. Look.”

Tony squinted at the screen.

_It was him._ The picture was grainy, but there was no mistake. Peter was just getting out of the back of a black sedan. Was it just his imagination the kid looked scared? The door was being held open for him by some brick shithouse dude in a suit.

A very _familiar_ brick shithouse.

“That. That. Who the hell is that? Friday, who is that guy?” Tony grabbed his sunglasses off the desk and shoved them back on his face. His head hurt.

“I know him,” he said under his breath.

“I’m afraid I can’t find record of him, boss,” Friday chirruped.

It didn’t matter. Tony had remembered.

“SHIELD.” He stood up, leaned close to the screen and held the desk because it felt like he would fall over. “He was with SHIELD. He came up to the tower when they took the scepter.” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up in all directions. “Was he one of the Hydra double-agents?” He was babbling. “He could’ve gone underground. They could be forcing Peter to make weapons.” He could see it now. An underground Hydra lab. A gun to some girl’s head while they forced Peter to come up with new nuke designs.

“Tony,” Rhodey said. “Tony. Slow down. First things first: we’ve got an address. We need to inform—”

“Give it to me.”

Rhodey looked up at Tony from his seat at the table, brow furrowed. He twisted a pen between his hands. Not a good sign.

“We need to inform the—”

Tony slammed both hands down on the table. Rhodey jumped and bit off his own sentence, remained silent as Tony lowered his head and tried to corral his rage.

_“Give. It. ...To me.”_

He looked up, wished he hadn’t. Rhodey’s expression was awful. A mixture of pity and caution.

“There are channels we agreed to go through—”

Tony leaned across the table and grabbed one of Rhodey’s hands. His friend cut off, closed his eyes as if the touch hurt, somehow.

“Give it to me, Rhodey. Right now. Or you and me, we are _done.”_

Shock and pain scrolled across Rhodey’s face. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have meant it.

But he had and he did. He could think of a dozen reasons that somebody _else_ could have disappeared off the map and then wound up with a former SHIELD (possibly Hydra) agent. Those reasons spanned the gamut from turning traitor to going full-blackout undercover for the sake of God and country.

Not Peter, though. Peter would have called. He would have texted.

He would have let Tony know.

“You think I care? Rhodey? I will _burn this place to the ground_. I will sever _every_ tie I’ve _ever_ made. I’m not waiting another day just to find out some Hydra fuckwad slit Peter’s throat in a back alley while the UN puts my request on next month’s ‘ _agenda.’”_ He made air quotes around the last word.

There was a long silence. Tony panting, Rhodey not making eye contact.

“I can’t help you, if you do this,” Rhodey said at last.

“I won’t need it.”

 

—

 

Day Three: 23:17 hours

The window crashed in.

At first, Peter thought it was another dream. His mouth went suddenly empty and he gasped in a deep lungful of air. It made his ribs scream—at least one had to be broken—but he couldn’t indulge in crying. No telling how much time he had to breathe before the next man started using him.

He hung his head, slack in the net of Venom’s tentacles. He was standing, bent over with his arms bound behind him, so they could take him from both ends. Daddy said if he made all their friends happy, they would give him a special treat.

He wanted that. More than anything, he wanted them to be pleased with him. Everything hurt so much less when Eddie and Venom were happy.

But this dream of the window breaking, it got in the way of Peter being good. He couldn’t tell _what_ they were doing to him, anymore. It felt like nothing. He was just dangling there, not being used.

A series of loud bangs made him flinch, then something snapped overhead. The floor rushed up to meet his face and he might have blacked out for a second.

When he opened his eyes, there was plaster and broken glass everywhere. Venom no longer held him in secure bondage. Peter was naked on the floor, alone, splayed out like the corpse in the opening credits of a TV murder mystery.

He brushed the haze from his eyelashes. Coughed. So much dust. There were men moving. Guns firing. Something gold and red barreling at him from out of the haze—

Peter barely had time to flinch before he was pushed into the floor by something hard as steel. It curled over him, held him tight, and jolted as gunfire battered its metal body. Peter squinted his eyes open.

_Iron Man._

Those glowing, slit eyes were looking straight at him.

Every horrible second of Peter’s recurring nightmare from the last few months came crashing down on him. It was happening again. In a minute, he was going to see Eddie and Venom burn to death, and Mr. Stark would take back the spider-suit and tell Peter how disgusted he was with him, and then he would leave.

Something bigger than a bullet clunked into Iron-Man’s mask and diverted his attention. He held out one palm to send a blast back at his attacker. The movement gave Peter just enough slack to squirm out from under him.

_There._ There was Venom, huge and terrible, their toothy maw open in a bellow of rage.

Venom was on fire.

 

—-

 

Tony sent a drone up, first. He wasn’t suicidal, no matter what Rhodey thought. He’d take a look around, see what Mr. Hotshot-Because-I-Own-One-Single-Floor-Of-A-Second-Rate-Building Eddie Brock was doing.

Friday gave him a full view of the drone’s hi-def camera as it buzzed up the side of the building. Floor after floor of empty rooms, people sleeping (no one closes their windowshades above the 30th floor), people partying.

“Comin’ up on fifty-two, boss,” Friday told him.

The lights were on in Eddie Brock’s floor.

A group of rough-looking men in various stages of undress. Some still wore hip or leg holsters packed with guns and knives. Definitely some shady shit going down in Eddie’ Brock’s place tonight.

Something black stretched like vines down from the ceiling. The men were all gathered in a circle around it. With the way half of them had their shirts off and appeared to be stroking themselves, they seemed to be in the middle of some weird orgy that centered around those vines.

“Well, this is creepy,” Tony muttered. “The hell is that thing?”

One of the men pushed out of the center. He tucked his dick back into his pants and hitched them up. Grinning, he elbowed one of the other guys and said something. Tony recognized him: it was the SHIELD/Hydra agent from the traffic cam.

The men changed positions, giving Tony his first clear view of what was in the middle.

_Peter._

 

—

 

It was a funny thing; people always talk about “seeing red.” Tony had used the phrase himself. He would’ve applied it to the time he found out that Steve Rogers’ psychotic war buddy had killed his parents.

He realized now that he’d been wrong. He’d never “seen red” before this moment.

Pressure built inside his skull. A ringing in his ears. The world went a startling crimson, as if someone had painted his visor with a tinted coat.

There seemed no time at all between the decision to kill and his arrival at the fifty-second floor. He blasted the window into glittering pieces. Men scrambled for their weapons and shot at him. None of their rounds were enough to pierce his armor. Tony moved into the room like the wrath of Satan. Not God; he had never aspired for that. But Satan? Tonight, he could manage it.

Because these men were going to die. Every. Last. One.

“Flamethrowers,” he told Friday. He raised both fists.

His aim turned at the last instant as something gargantuan and black, with teeth the size of his forearms, came charging toward him. Tony hit it with both jets and it skidded away. Its wail cut through his ears, even through the suit. There were bullets going wild in every direction, now, and _where had Peter gone?_

There. Crumpled on the floor, no sign of the black vines that had suspended him from the ceiling. Christ, he was in the dead center of the gunfire.

Tony ran to him, crouched down to shield him from the hail of bullets that came their way. _Stupid, Tony, stupid! Revenge comes second. First, save the kid. That’s what you’re here for._

A heavy round clunked off his forehead.

Tony raised his palm and sent a blast that took out the shooter, but Peter booked it out from under him and ran.

_“FUCK!”_ Tony yelled.

“Hey Boss, d’ye remember that Falcon fellow?” Friday chirped in his ear.

“What?” Tony snapped, still looking around. Where had Peter gotten off to?

“At yer ten, sir,” Friday said.

Tony swung around to his ten o’clock.

That bastard Sam Wilson flew right through the broken window _and the motherfucking Winter Soldier_ jumped off his back, a gun blazing in each hand.

Too much was happening at once. Tony turned at an alarmed squeak from Friday to find that gargantuan, black man-shaped creature which, despite being very much on fire, was charging toward him with mayhem in its shark’s grin.

Sam came in low over Tony’s shoulder, barreled into the creature and rolled off in a disgustingly smooth flip, flames trailing from his wings.

_”Find the kid!!”_ Sam screamed as he flew back past Tony to hit the creature a second time.

Fuck! He’d let himself get distracted.

“Friday, find his heat signature.” Tony turned from the ongoing battle. Ignored the hail of bullets. _There._ Behind the wall, a lone, slender figure on its knees, reaching for something.

Tony dashed around the wall. It was a spacious kitchen with marble counters and one Peter Parker emerged from behind a cabinet, a fire extinguisher in his hands and tears streaming from his eyes. He saw Tony blocking his way back and froze like a deer in headlights.

Those eyes. God, those eyes. Rimmed in black. Cuts on his cheeks. Split eyebrows. Split lip. But the eyes...they had a look in them, as though Peter had stepped into the void and only part of him had come back.

Determination settled into Peter’s battered features. He put the extinguisher under one arm like a football, tucked against a patch of skin so black, it had to be broken ribs. Peter ran toward Tony, who reached out to catch him.

Peter ducked under his reaching arm. Almost got past him, except the extinguisher hit Tony’s armor with a _clank._

Definitely broken ribs. Peter tumbled to the floor with a mewl of pain and the extinguisher rolled away from him. He scrambled after it on hands and knees.

That was the first time Tony saw his back.

His _back._

Tony swallowed a cry of outrage. He couldn’t indulge that, now. He lunged down and grabbed the kid, dragged him fighting all the way back into the kitchen. In the main room, that monster was screaming. Peter screamed right along with it.

_“NO! NOOOO! No, please, no, please don’t, please don’t hurt them—”_

Tony had seen the kid bench-press a bus, but that had been before. Right now, Peter couldn’t even hold himself up. The thrashing exhausted him and he sagged in Tony’s grip. He sobbed like his heart was being ripped apart.

The rest of him certainly had been. What looked like bites from that monster’s teeth dotted his legs, his shoulders. Some were scabbed. Others had scarred. Deep gouges had been cut into Peter’s hips and his back. _Claws._ They had come from that _thing’s_ claws, he was sure of it. Some were still bleeding. Others had sealed into ridged, purple scars. Still others were so white, they looked years old. But they weren’t. The kid healed fast. Fast enough to be walking, even with broken ribs and white fluid leaking down both his inner thighs.

Fast enough for a group of sadists to take an interest in him.

This...this was...

Oh god.

Why couldn’t Peter have been making nuclear weapons?

“—ONY! TONY! TONY!”

He snapped back to himself, realized a woman had been shouting his name for a while, now. He couldn’t muster up surprise when he locked eyes with the owner of that voice: Natasha Romanov, completely recognizable despite the white hair. She shook something at him. A tan colored blanket.

“What,” Tony said. It was the best he could muster. “Why,” he added a second later.

“Wake up, Tony! Listen to me. Are you listening?”

Tony nodded. She couldn’t see his face—he was grateful for that—but she could see the mask tilt up and down.

“You get him out of here. You were _never_ here. You got that? It was us who raided the place.”

“How,” Tony blurted. He seemed constrained to the “Five Ws and How.” Next he’d be asking _where_ , _when_ , and _who._ Except, just then, he saw _who._ Steve Fucking Rogers himself was out there, pummeling some half-naked shitbiscuit into the floor.

“Rhodey sent us,” Natasha said, stealing his attention back.

“When?” Tony asked. Like a jackass.

“Right after you left. He can’t come to the party because of a little thing called ‘plausible deniability.’ On that note,” she opened the blanket in both hands and wiggled it meaningfully. “Get moving. Feds can’t be far behind.”

Tony snatched the blanket out of her hands and whipped it around Peter before he could bolt, but all the fight seemed gone from him. The devastation in his face, that was going to haunt Tony’s nightmares for the rest of his life.

_“Daddy,”_ Peter whimpered. Tony froze. Natasha’s eyebrows drew down.

”Go,” she said, after a beat’s hesitation.

Tony nodded. “Friday, we have a passenger.”

“Got him fer ya, Boss,” his AI said brightly. Cords shot out of the Iron Man suit and wrapped around Peter, securing him to Tony.

He blasted them out of there without another word. He only paused to check one thing.

The black creature had been reduced to a steaming pile of slime. An unrecognizably burnt human body was just visible through the goo.

The monster was dead.

Good.

Behind the monster’s corpse, Tony caught sight of the Winter Soldier. His metal hand drew a blade across the throat of one of the rapists. Tony didn’t bat an eyelash.

Everyone who had been in that room was dead. Some of them just hadn’t caught on, yet.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm only slightly hugging myself right now. Petey's getting rescued!!!
> 
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> 
> Tumbl me [HERE](http://subverbaldreams.tumblr.com) for more art and fics.
> 
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> 
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	2. Safe, Not Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter is in shock. Tony holds it together for both of them as long as he can.
> 
> (Angst, self-harm, and X-Men original timeline movies crossover because it just felt right.)

Hurt.

Everything hurt.

A drumbeat throbbed through Peter’s whole body, drowning out thought. He squirmed, then stilled. Movement made the pain worse.

Voices. No—just one voice, murmuring over him. Peter cracked his eyelids open.

Light seared his eyes. The ceiling seemed too high. He couldn’t tell which room of Eddie’s apartment he was in.

“Pete. Pete, baby you hear me?” The voice was male. Hushed. It wasn’t Eddie.

Peter licked his lips. Tried to ask for Eddie. All that came out was a rusty sigh.

A gentle hand petted his hair back. It was nice. Maybe Eddie was here, just keeping quiet. Sometimes they did that. Sometimes Peter would be so alone, so hurt, then find out Eddie had been there all along.

“You’re safe now. It’s alright. You’re safe. We gotta get you cleaned up, though.”

Why did that voice sound so familiar?

A face swam in and out of focus. Peter fought to speak.

 _“Da...ddy.”_ He wanted Eddie and Venom. He needed them. To hurt him, more and more until the pain finally stopped. To hold him. They always held him after they’d hurt him real bad. He needed that.

A hand stroked over his cheek. Warm. Peter turned his face into the touch like a flower reaching for the sun.

“No, Peter, it’s me. It’s Tony. You’re in Stark tower. You’re safe.”

_Stark tower._

_Tony._

_Tony STARK?!_

Peter kept blinking until the blobs of light and shadow formed into a face.

Tony Stark looked down on him. Still in his Iron Man suit, which explained why Peter’s upper back felt like it was being cradled by a crash bar.

Their eyes met for a brief second before Peter scrunched his shut.

No. No, no, no.

He tried to wake up. Had to wake up before his nightmare continued down its inevitable path. It was the same every time.

Tony, his idol, his hero, would look down at him with revulsion. Would tell him they were DONE and don’t bother trying to call; the number’s been disconnected. Then he’d take back the Spider-Man suit.

_Congratulations._

Always the same words.

_Congratulations. You’ve been fucking a murderer._

Peter recoiled from the voice, but it followed him. Burned him from the inside out.

Tony hated him.

_Filthy. Bad. Congratulations._

Peter tried to scream, but his voice wouldn’t come.

_Wake up. WAKE UP._

_WAKE UP!_

 

—

 

Tony felt like his insides had been scraped out with a rusty shovel—possibly one that had just been used to scoop horse shit—by the time he got Peter back to his penthouse. He sent a message to Hap and Rhodey that the kid was home. Told them to let Mae know _(oh god, when she found out...)_ that Peter was safe. To double up security and let _no one_ into the building without his say-so.

Friday released the cords holding Peter’s bundled form to him. The kid slumped into his arms and Tony carried him to the couch. He let his mask and gloves retract but he left the suit on; it would help him carry Peter wherever he needed to. He cradled Peter’s upper body with one arm, flicked on a pair of glasses and had Friday do a scan. He watched Peter’s vitals through the lenses.

Three cracked ribs. Multiple contusions, but no other broken bones. The claw marks along Peter’s shoulders and back had closed up a little in the time it had taken to fly him home. Other claw marks on his hips were also closing. He was healing faster than anything Tony had seen. Stitches would probably just get in the way.

They needed to clean him up. He was covered in plaster dust and he _stank._ Smelled like blood and fear.

_And cum._

Tony had thought he was emptied out. Turned out, that had been an inaccurate assessment. His chest seized so hard, he couldn’t breathe for a second.

Peter’s eyelids fluttered open. His eyes remained unfocused.

Tony thumbed a lock of tangled hair off Peter’s forehead. Forced his throat to open, his voice to come out with some semblance of gentleness.

“Pete. Pete, baby, you hear me?”

A sigh. Peter had heard his voice.

“You’re safe now. It’s alright,” Tony murmured. “You’re safe. We gotta get you cleaned up, though.”

Infection. Did Peter’s enhancement protect him from MRSA? From STIs? From _AIDS??_ The boy was an open wound.

_I was supposed to protect you._

_“Da...ddy.”_

Tony froze. Again. Peter kept saying that word and it was starting to scare the shit out of him. The kid’s voice was so small. Hopeful.

Tony stroked the less bruised side of Peter’s face. His mouth opened over a silent sob when Peter turned his face into the touch. He didn’t deserve that kind of trust.

“No, Peter, it’s me. It’s Tony. You’re in Stark tower. You’re safe.”

Peter blinked rapidly. His sweet, puppy eyes focused, then widened with recognition.

Peter’s face turned dead white.

He lurched out of Tony’s arms. Almost fell off the couch, but Tony caught him. Peter’s heartrate jackrabbited against Tony’s palm. His ribs heaved in and out, hitched as the movement jarred his cracked ribs, but it didn’t slow him down. He was hyperventilating.

“Pete! Pete! Hey, hey, sweetheart, please. Slow breaths, baby, you’re hurt. It’s okay.”

No dice. His words weren’t getting through. Peter reacted as if Tony had shouted at him. His shoulders hunched around his ears; mouth pulled into a tormented grimace, he dug his fingers into some of the wounds on his own shoulder and _pulled._

It was like he had pulled the arc reactor right out of Tony’s chest. It _hurt,_ hurt maybe as much as the wound now pouring blood over Peter’s fingertips must have hurt. Tony grabbed Peter’s hand and wrenched it away from his shoulder. Peter’s other hand went to his own face. Tony caught his wrist before Peter’s fingernails had quite settled into his cheek. Peter fought to keep hurting himself for a few seconds, then slumped in defeat.

 _“I’m sorry. Mr. Stark, I’m so—s-so—sor-ry.”_ Peter’s voice hitched and broke into thin sobs. He tried to cover his face, but Tony kept hold of his wrists, lifted him back onto the couch and pulled the blanket around his waist. Peter tucked his chin to his own chest, trying to hide.

“Petey,” Tony murmured. “Kiddo. Why’re you sorry? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Peter squirmed, as if those words had lit a fire under his skin. _“I wanted it,”_ he blurted.

Another jolt to the chest. The kid was out of his mind with pain. He didn’t know what he was saying. But Peter shook his head, sucked in one deep, fast breath after another.

_“W-wanted it, and, I’m, so sorry, I tried—”_

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” It was not okay. He wasn’t qualified for this. He was going to fuck Peter up worse than he already was. Helplessness sat like a boulder in Tony’s gut.

 _“I tried to leave,”_ Peter whimpered.

“I know you did, baby.” Tony placed Peter’s hands together on his lap and put one hand over them, ready to catch him if needed. He raised his other hand to cradle Peter’s head. The kid pushed into the touch and let out a little sigh. “You were so strong. You got through it.”

He’d said the wrong thing. Peter cringed away from Tony’s stroking hand, shrank into himself like he would disappear.

 _“I wanted it,”_ he repeated, as Tony pried his hands apart.

“Baby, stop.” There were skinned scratches along the back of each hand.

 _“I’m not good anymore,”_ Peter insisted. Like it was important he make Tony understand.

Tony’s eyes stung with tears; he kept them wide so they wouldn’t fall.

“That’s not true, Pete. You’re very good, you’re brave, you’re—” But Peter was getting more and more worked up as Tony spoke.

 _“Stop, please stop,”_ Peter begged. Tears spilled down his cheeks, cutting tracks through the plaster dust still on his face. His heart rate had started to rise again; Tony was monitoring it through his glasses.

 _Okay,_ Tony told himself. _Okay. Come on, genius. It’s pretty clear. Praise bad, touch good, and we Don’t Talk About The Problem._ He should be good at this. Right? He had decades of practice Not Talking About Various Problems.

“Petey, listen to me. I need you to do me a favor, okay? Because I would like to take this suit off, but I have to know you’re not gonna hurt yourself. Can you do that for me?”

Peter looked down at his lap. His lips trembled.

“I don’t know,” he breathed.

“Alright. Okay. Honesty. Honesty is good. That’s a start.”

He thought about taking the suit off anyway. It was physically painful not to be able to hold Peter completely. Just crush the kid to his chest and feel his heart beat, to know he was alive. But he had a terrible vision of Peter suddenly losing his shit, overpowering him and highdiving off the side of the building.

No. The suit stayed on.

“How about getting washed up?” Tony asked carefully. “Cuz I noticed you’ve got a lot of dust in your hair.” It seemed the safest thing to point out. Peter looked confused, so Tony pinched a lock of Peter’s hair between his fingers and held them out to display the beige powder.

Peter nodded. _“Wanna get clean,”_ he breathed.

 

—

 

Tony would rank helping Peter bathe among one of the most heartrending experiences of his life, and he’d had quite a few of those.

When the kid wasn’t zoned out like a zombie mannequin, he was crying. He apologized for everything except breathing and Tony wouldn’t be surprised if that came next. He would jump and look around like he’d forgotten where he was. Tony reminded him, over and over. He couldn’t tell if his words got through.

The water should have kept Peter warm, but toward the end of the bath he was shivering so hard, his teeth chattered. Tony pulled him out of the water and dried him off, dressed him in a thick, heavy bath robe that covered everything—even his hands, if he let the sleeves fall down. Peter shivered nonstop. He refused food, but drank a glass of water.

While Peter was brushing his teeth, Tony left the bathroom so he could have a quick huddle with Friday about the whole jumping-off-the-tower scenario that wouldn’t stop playing through his head. He dispatched an army of automated Iron Man suits to stand guard around the tower, ready to catch Peter if he tried to eject without a parachute.

That most important task complete, Tony put in a STAT request to the only physician he knew that he remotely trusted to handle this situation with the delicacy it required. He also sent a message to Happy, asked him to grill Mae about everything Peter liked, from food to video games, and get it all shipped up post haste.

After all that, he went back into the bathroom. Peter had one hand propped on the mirror. He was bent over the sink, his other arm working furiously back and forth, brushing his teeth. Which would be fine, except he’d been brushing his teeth when Tony left the room five minutes ago.

“Pete?”

No reaction. Peter kept working the toothbrush in his mouth as Tony came up beside him. Peter’s eyes were focused somewhere far away. His forehead was knotted.

Spit had pooled in the porcelain bowl of the sink. Spit laced through with crimson, like the swirls of color inside a marble.

Tony laid a hand on Peter’s shoulder. Got an arm up just in time to block the backhand that came at his face. Peter’s forearm clanged hard against the Iron Man suit, yet he gave no indication that it hurt. He was still staring off into space. Blood streaked down his chin.

But he had fight left in him. That was something.

 

—

 

Dr. Jean Grey floated into the spacious living room, slender and elegant in a charcoal suit and black rimmed glasses, with her red hair clipped so that it spilled in waves down her back. She exchanged a brief hello with Tony, then went to Peter.

Something in Tony’s chest came uncoiled when Peter remained calm throughout her examination. That was one of the reasons Tony had called her. He was certain that she was another Enhanced, although she had managed to keep it under wraps. She just had this calming effect on everyone around her. He watched it work, right now, as Peter’s shoulders relaxed and the lines in his face smoothed out.

Peter allowed her to open the bath robe and look at his wounds. He even let her examine his anus for tearing. Once that ordeal was over, Tony fetched some comfortable, cotton pants and a shirt for Peter to wear.

But Peter had already shut down. He sat on the couch and stared into the distance; he put his hand over the clothing when Tony pressed it on him, but he didn’t make a move to dress himself. After fruitless minutes of coaxing, Tony shot a clenched-teeth look up at Jean, who had just returned from the kitchen with a mug in her hand. Her expression revealed nothing of her thoughts. She produced a vial out of nowhere, put two drops of something into the mug, and pressed it into Peter’s hands.

“Drink this, Peter. It’ll help.”

Tony frowned a question at her. Jean flashed him that Mona Lisa smile of hers.

Without batting an eyelash, Peter lifted the mug to his lips. He drank it all with a thousand-yard stare, then just cradled the empty mug. Jean laid both her elegant hands around his.

”Thank you,” she said. “I’m so happy I got to meet you, today.” She made it sound so earnest, as if Peter had done her a huge favor. Though he didn’t look up, the ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth as she gently took the mug from him.

Inch by inch, they watched Peter slump sideways onto the couch until he lay horizontal. Passed out. Jean walked to the kitchenette and typed out notes on her tablet. Tony followed her.

”What were those drops?” Tony murmured.

“Sedative,” Jean said serenely. “Non-addictive.” She tapped one more time then locked her screen. “You’re right. No stitches; he’s going to heal on his own.” She held the tablet to her chest and folded her arms over it. The look she gave Tony...it was _incisive._ Like she was cutting through layers of him with her mind. Tony ran a finger along the side of his lenses on instinct, darkening the tint. He didn’t even realize he’d done it until it was done. Jean’s mouth quirked in a sad smile.

“I’ll send you my notes shortly and come back tomorrow. You’ve said he processes drugs fast, so he may wake up during the night. If he does, you can give him two more drops of this as needed,” she set the little bottle on the counter, “no more than every four hours. I’ll have my cell if you need it.”

She held out her hand to shake and Tony took it out of habit; in his mind, he was already carrying Peter to bed. Jean held his hand a beat longer, watching him. He was glad he’d darkened his shades; those eyes of hers were piercing.

“Have a restful sleep, Tony,” she said, before releasing him.

Tony nodded a beat too late; her back was already turned. He would just pour himself a drink, before bed. A drink would be good. Nearly four days without sleep had him wired.

He poured a shot. Drank it.

Poured another.

He needed it. No shame in that.

His phone gave a ding as he raised the second shot to his mouth. It was from Jean.

 

_[Thank you for calling me. I would like to see Peter every day for the first week. I support your decision to have him move in.]_

 

Tony re-read that line twice, then ran his finger up the side of his lenses. The words were still there, even when the lenses were clear.

He hadn’t told anyone that Peter was staying. Hell, _Peter_ didn’t even know. The rest of Jean’s message was just as mystifying:

 

_[You’re doing everything right, Tony. Keep it up.]_

_[P.S.: Speak to Colonel Rhodes tomorrow, after you’ve had some sleep.]_

 

Jean was Enhanced. A psychic. He was _sure_ of it. That thing about Rhodey, though...that gave him a cold chill. His mind went directly to sirens and SWAT teams hunting him down.

Tony finished his drink, downed a third one just to be safe, then went back to Peter. Still out for the count. He didn’t stir a muscle, even when Tony put a hand on his shoulder.

He looked so brittle. Like a stray breeze might puff him into ash. Tony shuddered at the mental image.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he murmured, sliding an arm under Peter. “Time for bed.”

 

—

 

Tony’s bed was huge. Peter looked so tiny in it. So fragile.

So alone.

He’d been alone for months. The scars...Jesus, the fucking scars...

Tony covered his eyes with one hand, pulled at his hair. Wished he could kill everyone who’d hurt Peter himself. Personally. See their eyes as they went. Know that, for just one second, _they_ were as afraid as Peter had been. The Winter Fucking Soldier didn’t have the right to be the one...he didn’t have the _right..._

The weight of every death Tony had ever caused—the innocent ones, the ones who had done nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time—came crashing down on him. It was like that, sometimes.

Tony sagged. He didn’t have enough energy left for a panic attack. He disengaged with the suit at long last, then adjusted the pillow under Peter’s head as the last sections of metal flew off his limbs to reassemble in the corner of the room. He smoothed Peter’s hair off his forehead, pulled the sheet and comforter up to his chin.

He’d dressed the kid once he was passed out. Tugged fabric over corpse-heavy limbs so that when Peter woke, he wouldn’t be naked. But to get Peter dressed meant to revisit those jagged, open wounds and poisonous black bruises.

_Why didn’t you SAY something?_

That question was killing him inside.

If he’d known Mae’s boyfriend had torn their patchwork family apart, he would have sent lawyers to smooth it out.

If he’d known Peter was homeless, he would have rented him an apartment.

If he’d known Peter was being hurt, he would have _Dealt With It._

One of Tony’s hands crept under his own shirt and scratched at the scabs around his implant.

 _“Why didn’t you tell me?”_ His voice was barely a hiss of air, but the hatred in it _burned._

This was the very special hatred that not even Peter’s tormentors could merit. This was the hatred Tony saved up all for himself.

He hadn’t read a single one of Peter’s text messages until he’d found out the kid was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jean is just the best.


	3. Fix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dust begins to settle, but a greater problem looms ahead.

In retrospect, it was a bad combination to:

1) sleep next to someone who could juggle trucks, who

2) was going to wake up disoriented and scared, while

3) _not_ wearing the Iron-Man suit, and

4) being, overall, less on the “super-soldier” and more on the “tendon-I-sprained-ten-years-ago-still-acts-up-sometimes” side of things.

But Tony always tended to learn things the hard way.

He woke up literally _in the air._ He had the fleeting thought that this was not going to end well, then hit the ground at an oblique angle. Momentum tumbled him along until he hit the wall. Dazed, he protected his face with his arms and tried to figure out just what in the hell was going on. The room wore shadow like a disguise, but he heard Peter’s frantic whimpers.

 _“...Lights,”_ Tony wheezed.

The shadows slunk away to reveal Peter. He’d thrown all the blankets to the foot of the bed and had his back pressed against the headboard. He squinted against the light, chest pumping like a bellows on overdrive.

Tony pushed himself up. His spine cracked. And his shoulder. Oh, and his knee; nice.

“Pete?”

Not even a blink.

Tony glanced across the room, at his waiting armor. He should put it on. Peter didn’t seem to know where he was; if Tony had hit the ground dead-on from that throw…

He pushed himself up and approached the bed.

“Hey, buddy. It’s me, remember? It’s Tony.”

The huffing breaths took on a slight wheeze, but otherwise nothing changed.

For once in his life, words deserted him. Because he knew. Maybe not this, specifically, but he knew being trapped inside himself, where there was only fear and pain. He racked his brain, trying to think of what might’ve helped him during one of his attacks. Despaired when he came up blank. No one had been able to help. He’d demolished plenty of relationships to find that out.

He almost walked up next to Peter. Almost, before he realized he would be standing over the kid, looking down at him. Probably not the best move if he wanted Peter to calm down.

Tony stopped a good distance from the bed, knelt on the floor, and sat back on his heels. He put both hands in his lap, palms up.

“Hey, Pete. I don’t know where you are, right now, but whenever you’re able to come back? I’m gonna be right here.”

 

—

 

Flames. The room was in flames. Venom and Eddie were screaming, but Peter couldn’t get to them. Something had fallen on his chest and he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get it off.

He wasn’t good enough, hadn’t tried hard enough. Wasn’t good enough even for Venom. He couldn’t protect anyone.

_Hey, buddy. It’s me, remember?_

Venom screeched and burned.

_It’s Tony._

Peter tried to speak back, but it was useless. _He_ was useless. He was no hero. No good guy.

_I’m gonna be right here._

Just a whisper outside the crackle of flame. Might have been a ghost.

 _Don’t leave me alone!_ The thought came and was gone before Peter could push it to his lips.

But the voice didn’t leave him. It spoke soft, gentle words. It ebbed and flowed, at first, but grew slowly stronger until it was more real than Venom’s screams.

Peter blinked. Eddie Brock’s dark, red bedsheets faded into white. Then back to red. Then white.

The calm voice remained, while the screams faded into the ring of blood pounding through his ears. Peter’s mouth was dry and felt raw as if he’d been swishing gravel.

“Hey, kiddo. You with me?”

Peter swiveled his head toward the voice. The room spun.

Eddie crouched next to the bed, ready to spring. _Hungry._

Peter flinched like he’d been socked in the chest. But in the next instant, Eddie was gone. It was Tony Stark and he was kneeling, not crouching. He looked haggard.

And yet...some of the lines smoothed out of his face when Peter looked at him.

A sensation like shattering glass trickled down the inside of Peter’s ribcage. Somewhere in the back of his head, Venom kept shrieking.

“Is he dead?” Peter blurted the question. Knew what it would sound like. As if he wanted Venom back.

_Congratulations. You’ve been fucking a murderer._

“They’re _all_ dead,” Tony said. Something terrible lurked in the backs of his eyes: a ghost of the Tony from Peter’s nightmares. But Tony passed a hand across his face and it was gone. He put one hand to the floor and pushed to his feet, wobbled and fell back onto one knee.

“Mr. Stark!”

Peter didn’t think. He jumped off the bed and caught Tony under the arm. Electricity jolted up from his hand.

Red sheets. White sheets.

He blinked and Tony turned to Eddie. Blinked again and they switched back. That mountain put its knee into his chest and pushed.

Red sheets. Eddie in his arms, tanned skin rapidly eaten over by alien black.

 

—

 

When the ringing faded out of Peter’s ears, this time, he was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed. Tony was leaned back against the bed as well, with an arm propped on his bent knee. Peter glanced sideways at him. Quickly looked away, before Tony could change into anyone else.

 _“This—this is real, right? You’re really here?”_ Peter’s throat felt raw. Like he’d been screaming.

“This is real,” Tony said. “I’m right here. Not going anywhere.” He indicated the space between them. Peter looked down; a bottle of spring water sat there on the floor. “Got you some water. Well—Friday did.”

 _“Thanks, Friday,”_ Peter murmured.

“Yer welcome, Pete.” Friday’s warm, Irish accent sounded from somewhere overhead.

Peter’s heart rolled over in his chest. He hadn’t heard his own suit’s voice, Karen’s voice, in a long time. The spider-suit was probably burned up, now. Or maybe Eddie had sold it to Hydra.

That last thought had tears coursing down his face. He’d really messed everything up.

Beside him, Tony picked up the water bottle himself and cracked the cap. He took a sip off the top, set it back down, and held something out in his palm. It was a little glass vial.

“Doc said you could take this every four hours, to make you sleep. Do you want it?”

Did he? Peter chewed the inside of his lip. He didn’t want to be knocked out. Anything could happen while he was asleep.

But when he risked a glance at Tony’s face, he saw the dark rings under his eyes. The stubble that had grown in around his usually trim beard. Tony was exhausted. He was only staying up for Peter.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Please.”

Tony smiled. It came off as a grimace. He opened the vial and tipped a few drops into the water bottle.

The last thing Peter remembered was setting the empty bottle down on the floor.

—

 

Tony did what Stark men do when they can’t sleep.

He worked. By sunrise Tony had a small, running workshop set up next to the bed and was hunched over his current brainchild: a series of silver boxes set into a black cord necklace.

Normally when Tony worked, time ceased to exist. The world disappeared. His own AI had to put food in front of his face; otherwise, he would forget to eat.

But his attention went on hyper-alert when Peter’s breathing changed. He turned toward the bed, all work forgotten. Peter’s eyes were open. Watching him.

The kid was an open book. When he saw Tony watching, his eyes filled with tears. If Peter started to apologize again, Tony was going to crack. Best to head that off at the pass.

“Hey, sleepy. So. It is...a new day, and I...am making you breakfast. Annnd if you don’t eat it then I’ll have to eat it and I’m trying to watch my figure. So.” Fuck it. No one had ever said he would be good at this. Well, except Jean, but she had that whole bedside-manner thing going on.

Peter sat up and scooted back against the headboard. Tony stood, cracked his back, and cocked his head toward the living room. “C’mon. Let’s get some food in ya. I dunno if you like coffee—scratch that, too young for coffee. There’s tea. Let’s do tea. Or a milkshake. Milkshakes are good, right? Milk is a vitamin.”

This was what he’d been afraid of. He was executing a slow crash and burn. Tears rolled down Peter’s face; he looked like the next idiotic sentence might push him into a total meltdown.

“Peter, you need to eat so you can _heal.”_ Maybe straight-shooting reason would prevail.

“I lost the suit,” Peter blurted.

It took Tony a few breaths to realize he was talking about the Spider-Man suit; it was that far off his radar of things which currently mattered. Tony crossed his arms and rubbed a hand along his jaw. Peter thought he was worried about the _suit._

“Peter,” he said, then had to stop and swallow. “I don’t _care_ about the _suit._ I can make another _suit._ I can’t make another—” _you,_ but the word got stuck in his throat and now _he_ had tears.

Karen, the AI in Peter’s suit, had been designed to give Tony a heads-up if Peter got in too far over his head. He’d trusted his own technology. He’d trusted Karen to keep an eye on Peter.

The suit was currently sprawled in his workshop, half-dissected. Karen couldn’t remember the last six months and knew nothing about Eddie Brock. When Tony had opened up the control unit he’d found traces of a foreign substance, similar to the skin cells a human might have left behind. Except these were black, and they had never been human.

“OK. You know what? Yes. I need you to make up for losing track of the suit. I have this—this deep and abiding _need_ for you to drink an entire fruit smoothie. And that is the only thing that would possibly make me feel better, right now. Would you please do that for me?”

A sob cracked out of Peter’s mouth. “Mr. Stark,” he began, but Tony cut him off.

“If your next words aren’t ‘yes, of course I will have a delicious breakfast smoothie’—”

“Yes,” Peter said quickly, then alarm crossed his features. “Sir! Yes, sir. Oh, god.”

He burst into sobs.

The necklace Tony had worked on half the night sat gleaming on his workstation. He hadn’t had a chance to test it, yet. He clipped it around his throat anyway, then sat down next to Peter on the bed and faced up to the ugly truth, which was that he had no fucking clue how to offer a hug. He laid a hand on the bed between them, palm up.

“Y’know,” he said slowly, “the ‘sir’ thing...that gets kind of old. I hear it all day, at work. It’d be nice if you just call me ‘Tony.’ That’s what my friends call me.”

Well. When he’d had friends, that’s what they’d called him.

Peter shook his head. “I-I can’t, Mr. Stark, please, I’m not allowed—”

“You are absolutely allowed. This is me, right now, allowing you. Call me Tony, and nix the ‘sir.’ There; permission granted. Can’t be taken back, sorry...oh, kid.” Peter was bawling. Tony opened his arms where Peter could see, feeling like an utter ass. But Peter moved into the circle of his arms. He pushed tight into Tony’s chest and shuddered through another bout of sobs.

“Shh, you’re safe, sweetheart. You’re safe. Never gonna let anyone hurt you again.”

 

—

 

“Hey, Tones. How’s the kid?” Rhodey’s worried eyes assessed him from the computer screen.

“With the doc. It’s bad.” Tony propped his forehead in his hands, elbows on the desk. “Real bad.” His glasses weren’t dark enough. The sunlight from the window beside him made his head throb.

“You keep letting yourself go, you’re not gonna be any good to him,” Rhodey said. “Get some damn sleep and eat something.”

It sounded so much like what Tony had been trying to get Peter to do, he snorted. “Thanks, pop.”

Rhodey did that slow blink he reserved for when Tony was being an ass. “Look, I need to tell you some things. Some of ‘em are gonna hit hard.”

“Bring it on.”

“Our lady friend went through everything that was left behind,” he began.

“Don’t be vague, Rhodey. This line’s secure and I can barely hear you through my head pounding.”

Rhodey sighed. “The guy from the traffic cam was Hydra, like you thought. Hydra’s still active. And they’ve been in communication with something off-planet. Other creatures like that thing you burned up last night.”

There were _more_ of those things? Tony looked up slowly at the screen. “Others,” he repeated.

“Extraterrestrials.” Rhodey shook his head, like he was still trying to wrap his mind around it. “Some kind of parasite that takes control of the host. Fury’s already involved. He’s gonna get in touch with you. Said he thinks you can help.”

Tony grimaced. He wasn’t going to help Cranky Eye Patch with another righteous war. All he wanted was to see Peter’s goofy smile again.

“Fine. Whatever. What else you got?”

Rhodey hesitated. Licked his lips. “I don’t know how to say this.”

A murmur from off-screen and Rhodey looked to the side. Tony straightened.

“Pep?”

“I’ll tell him.” A delicate, feminine hand appeared on Rhodey’s shoulder. An engagement ring sparkled off the ring finger through the video feed, then the camera tilted until Pepper’s face filled the screen. Beautiful as ever. Less tense than she used to be. Eyes softer. Rhodey had done that for her. Tony felt his lips move in an automatic half-smile.

“Hey troublemaker,” she said. “This is gonna hurt, so let’s get it done.” Now Tony’s half-smile was a real smile.

“Hit me,” he said.

“Eddie Brock and his Hydra connections worked specifically to keep this buried so you wouldn’t find out. Your legal team can have it undone in a hot second, so you know that thing you do, where you go into a tizzy and then sulk for a week? Don’t do that thing.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tony said. He even said it with a straight face. “Just hit me, Pep. What was Burnt Toast hiding ‘from me specifically’?”

Pepper’s lips thinned. “He legally adopted Peter.”

 

—

 

Tony stared at the screen. Time ticked by, muffled, like a clock wrapped in foam. Pepper dipped her chin. Her “concerned” look.

“Tony?”

Rhodey’s voice: “Tones, I know how messed up this is, but we’ll get it fixed—”

“No,” Tony said. “You don’t _fix…”_

His voice came from a long way away. He felt disconnected from his body, like he was controlling it from a distance.

He didn’t finish the thought. He hung up on them, then unplugged the PC so they couldn’t call back.

 

—

 

In the other room, Peter was curled in one corner of the couch. Dr. Grey sat on a chair in front of him. Her voice was like warm cocoa. His insides felt less jagged when she was around.

Dr. Grey flinched. Forehead knotted, she pressed her fingertips to one temple.

“Dr. Grey?” Peter frowned. His “spider-sense” was quiet, but that meant nothing. It hadn’t worked properly since he’d met Eddie.

“I’m fine, Peter. Just a muscle twinge.” She smiled; her forehead smoothed out. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She touched the back of his hand, just a gentle brush of skin. Sleepiness settled over Peter like a weighted blanket. He laid his head against the plush arm of the couch and closed his eyes.

It would be alright to sleep for a minute. She would come right back.

 

—

 

Tony jumped halfway out of the chair when he realized he was not alone. Jean stood just inside the doorway, watching him. 

“You knew.” His voice was a scrape of wind over sand.

“Peter told me.”

Tony’s jaw flexed. “No. You knew it yesterday and Peter didn’t say a word to you then.”

She didn’t even blink. “He didn’t tell me with words.”

No, of course not. Tony felt no triumph that she’d finally admitted what she was to him. He was still trying to decide if he was going to throw up.

“He called that _thing…”_ But his throat closed over the word, “daddy.” He couldn’t say it out loud. “I can fix just about anything, Jean.” He gestured toward the wall, toward the other room where she’d left Peter. “But not this.”

“That’s frustrating for you,” she said. A smile touched her lips, softening her words. “It’s not up to you to fix it, Tony. It’s up to Peter.”

Tony’s smile was not so soft. It felt like an open wound. “People don’t get fixed from shit like this.”

“They do,” Jean said, serene as ever. “Maybe they don’t tell _you_ about it. But they do.” Again, that smile as she resected his ego with surgical precision. Why did he surround himself with women who did that to him?

“He’s waking up,” Jean said, with a glance over her shoulder. “We’ll talk after.”

 _No, we won’t,_ Tony thought. He imagined he caught a knowing gleam in her eye.

Out loud he asked, “Do you know anything about the...the _thing_ that had control of Brock?”

Jean looked at him sideways, then turned away. “That’s outside my area of expertise,” she said.

“Jean.” Tony spread his hands. “Throw me a bone, here.”

She slipped out the door. It clicked shut behind her.

“Hey boss,” Friday said from overhead. “Nick Fury’s here to talk to ya. Should I let him in?”

Tony closed his eyes.

“Yeah. Fine. Meeting room. And put in a call to legal to get…” But his throat closed up over his next words.

“I took the liberty of contacting Molly while you were on the call with Colonel Rhodes, boss,” Friday said. “She says they can have the adoption nullified by tomorrow.”

All of Tony’s bones turned to jelly for a moment. He fell back in the chair and exhaled. Inhaled.

Exhaled.

“I should give you a raise,” he said at last. “I won’t. But I should. Take a memo.”

“You got it, boss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am slowly falling in love with Tony as I write this. :P
> 
>    
> I **[Tumbl](http://subverbaldreams.tumblr.com)** and I **[Twit](http://twitter.com/SubverbalD)**. If you’re enjoying this, please let me know.


	4. Give and Take

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony has a lot of help...some of which he doesn’t want.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: I will rack up a bunch of chapters so that I can post consistently if I get sick or something.
> 
> *passes the 2500 word mark*
> 
> Me: Argh! Too much excite 
> 
> *hits ‘post’*

Nick Fury looked exactly the same as he had the last time Tony had seen him: tired of the world’s bullshit, but still fighting the good fight.

Tony leaned against the wall of the board room and crossed his arms to show just how receptive he was feeling. Fury nodded greeting and took a seat in one of the leather swivel chairs set around the conference table. He leaned back and folded his hands across his stomach. His one eye searched Tony’s face.

“Romanov told me what happened to your friend,” Fury began, but Tony cut him off.

“Don’t.” He waited a beat. When Fury kept quiet, he added: “What do you want.”

Fury visibly shrugged off the pal approach. His voice took on the clipped tones Tony was accustomed to.

“An old contact of mine got in touch not too long ago. She had concerns because a race of symbiotic beings have been spreading like locusts across life-bearing planets. Just wanted me to have an eye out, in case. It wasn’t until last night we learned they’ve got scouts here on Earth.”

Tony tipped his shades down so he could pinch the bridge of his nose. Of course, it was always going to come to this. Ever since he’d seen the sky open and monsters fly in from an alien starscape, he’d known it was just a matter of time. Earth was on the universe’s radar, now.

“There are no ‘Avengers’ anymore,” Tony said. “So why are you  _ here?”  _

“I’m not here for the Avengers. I’m here for  _ you. _ These things are coming for us. I have a lead, but I can’t use it without your help.”

Tony grimaced, but he gestured for Fury to go on so they could get this over with. He needed to talk to Mae soon. She was going to be shattered. Would she accept it if Tony offered for her to come live in Stark tower? She might spit in his face. Happy should be getting here before too long with everything his team had bought for Peter. Maybe Tony could pay Jean to stay another couple of hours. 

His mind ran over everything while Fury explained the device he wanted. It was Tony’s curse that he could track Fury’s monologue and the rantings of his own inner demons without missing a word. But by the time Fury finished speaking, Tony knew he had no choice. 

“Alright.” He waved one hand in the air, as though it didn’t matter, when nothing could have been further from the truth. “I’ll have it for you this week.”

Fury looked taken aback that Tony had agreed so easily. Tony watched him put the pieces together. Watched him figure out this was not for him, at all. Fury nodded to himself.

“One more thing, Tony. The Avengers might be dead, but  _ everyone _ will be dead or enslaved if we can’t coordinate a solid defense. Just keep that in mind.”

Tony gave his stoniest face in response. “Noted.”

 

—

 

Having Mae over was every bit as painful as Tony had imagined it would be. She didn’t spit in his face. No, it was far worse than that.

She hugged him. Cried on his shoulder and told him how grateful she was he’d found Peter. A knife to the chest would have hurt less.

He stayed out of the room during the reunion, left Jean to supervise. Her exorbitant fee for canceling other clients was worth every cent not to have to watch Mae’s expression when she saw the state of her onetime ward. Tony mixed himself a drink and started making notes on his plans for Fury’s device.

Friday let him know when Happy had come and gone with all the stuff he’d bought for Peter. Tony grunted something. Went back to his work. Friday prodded again him when it had been three hours; that was all the time Jean had allotted to him.

Tony flicked his pencil off the table and sighed. Some things, he couldn’t delegate.

 

—

 

“Live here?” Mae’s swollen, red eyes were incredulous. Still gorgeous, even when she’d been crying for hours straight. “W-what, for like a week, a month?”

Peter’s doe eyes turned up to Tony. Suddenly, he wanted to take off the sunglasses. Wanted Peter to know how much he meant this.

He didn’t, though. Rejection would be easier with them on.

“Until Peter’s eighteen.” He expected Mae would want a definitive time frame. Not just, “as long as it takes” or “as long as you need.”

“Why would you do that? I don’t understand.” She looked back and forth between Tony and Peter. “He’s just an intern. Why are  _ you _ so interested in him?” Suspicion and fear clouded her face. Tony could practically  _ feel _ her mother instincts go into protect-mode. “Peter. What’s going on, here?”

Peter shook his head and pulled away from her. Which, of course, made her even  _ more  _ suspicious. Dark red flooded her cheeks and she turned suddenly livid eyes up to Tony. “Have you been— _ wait.“ _ She flew to her feet and stalked right up into Tony’s face. “Wait a goddamn minute. What kind of internship is this, anyway? Why do you have him here, wearing obviously  _ your _ clothes—” She cut off, pushed both hands into her hair like she would rip it out. “Oh my god. Ohh, god. He’s been here this whole time, hasn’t he?” She looked back at Peter, whose expression, Tony realized, seemed confirmation of her words. The kid was looking at Tony, as if for instruction. When Mae whirled back on Tony, her eyes were on fire.

“You think this is _ funny,  _ you sick bastard? You think just because you’re rich and we’re poor you can do whatever you want?” 

Her arm pulled back to give Tony the slap which, honestly, he’d been waiting for since she’d arrived.

Her arm pulled back—and jerked to a stop.

A gleaming strand of gossamer trailed from the back of her hand to the couch. Mae’s uncomprehending gaze followed the strand to its point of origin: Peter’s inner wrist. Peter looked as shocked as the two of them. His forearm flexed and the strand released from his wrist, dangled from the back of Mae’s hand like a stray spiderweb. 

“What the fuck?” Mae said, looking down at her hand. Her voice came out small. 

Peter seemed frozen. It was Tony who answered. 

“Ms. Taravelli, meet Spider-Man.”

 

—

—

 

Peter walked barefoot through darkness. He was tired. He just wanted to sleep. But when he got up to the bed, disquiet touched him. It felt too tall. Too soft. 

This wasn’t his twin bed at Mae’s house. Where was he?

**“Peter. Our boy. Come to bed.”**

The voice came straight out of a scary movie. Deep and inhuman, it clamped a fist around Peter’s lungs and squeezed all the air from them.

He’d never left. They still had him; he’d never left.

Peter couldn’t move. He stood stock-still, helpless as Eddie emerged from the darkness. Paralyzed, as Venom wrapped around his legs.

_ I don’t want this, _ he told himself, over and over to the sound of cold laughter. Sickness coiled in his stomach. He didn’t want it, but a part of him  _ did. _ They made him feel good.

He hated himself for that. Eddie and Venom helped him to forget the pain, to lose himself in pleasure.

Unable to move, unable to fight, Peter began to cry. 

If it had been Tony in his place, he wouldn’t have let them do this. He wouldn’t have let them turn him into this pathetic ruin. But Peter was weak. He didn’t deserve to be an Avenger.

Eddie stroked down the side of Peter’s face, then lifted his fingertips to his own mouth and licked the tears from them like a treat.

“Oh, we’re gonna have fun with you tonight,” Eddie murmured.

Venom’s blackness slithered up Peter’s legs. Panic careened through him, giving strength to his limbs. Peter lashed out at Eddie with everything he had left.

 

— 

 

He woke up to his own screams, to no Eddie, and to blankets, rather than Venom, tangled around his legs. He watched, unable to stop his fist as it flew toward Tony Stark’s startled face.

His knuckles came to a jarring halt in midair. Violet light haloed out from around his fist, then dissipated. 

Tony’s eyes were wide; his hand went to his own throat. He still hadn’t taken off that necklace he’d put on early yesterday morning: five silver rectangles set into black cord. That same violet light which had stopped Peter’s fist pulsed dully in the center of each rectangle.

“Oh-okay,” Tony said, breathless. “Good field test.”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter breathed, then his chest clenched tight and he couldn’t breathe at all. _He’d_ been the one to ask if Tony would stay with him tonight so he wouldn’t be alone. He could have _killed_ Tony without even realizing it. 

Tony wasn’t angry, though. He talked to Peter until his chest opened up, then coaxed him out of bed. Tony made tea and they sat together on the couch while Tony pulled up a 3-D rendering of the necklace and explained how it worked. Peter couldn’t follow all of what Tony said, but it didn’t matter. He could have been talking about lawn care and Peter would have taken comfort in his voice. Besides…

“You invented a force field last night...so we could sleep together?”

As soon as he said it, he bit his lips. Tony cocked his head and just sort of went still.

“Um. That’s not what I—” Peter began.

Tony lifted one finger in the air like a semicolon. “Yeah we’re not gonna call it that. Because this? Is not that. Just so we’re clear.”

“Yes sir,” Peter said quickly, then blanched when Tony gave him a look. “I mean, yes. Tony.”

“And I do  _ not _ want to wake up to Mae standing over me with any sharp implements after she moves in.”

“Sure.” Peter nodded like a bobble-head.

Tony looked like there was more he had to say, but he didn’t. Which was a relief.

 

—

 

Tony tried to get back to sleep; he had gotten maybe three hours the night before and three tonight (this would bring him to a whopping total of eight in the last five days), but Peter’s night terrors turned out to be stronger than Jean’s sleep medication. 

So they stayed up together, Tony working hard on Fury’s suppression device. Peter shadowed Tony like he was afraid he would disappear. He kept the kid busy with basic calculations and fetching tools for him, half of which he didn’t even need, it just gave Peter something to do. Peter was moving easier; the cuts on his back and shoulder were almost closed. He needed sleep, though. They both did.

When morning came, Peter went to take a shower. The water ran a good twenty minutes before Tony started to worry. He knocked and went into the bathroom to find Peter curled up in a corner of the shower, sobbing, with bloody scratches on his neck and down both arms.

Tony got him out of the shower and toweled off, then spent another half hour holding Peter while he shook. Once the kid calmed down, he put a movie Peter liked (according to the notes Happy had given him) up on a virtual widescreen and stepped into the adjoining room to call Fury.

“You look like shit,” Fury greeted him from the video feed. 

“Flatterer,” Tony said. “I’ve got a prototype, but there’s a problem. I’m gonna need a human test subject.”

“I got you covered,” Fury said. No hesitation. Tony frowned.

“Let me make this clear. We should be going through  _ months _ of animal testing before we even think about running this on a human. We’re talking about suppression of response to stimuli. If this goes wrong it could suppress other functions. Breathing, for example.”

“I understand that. And so does our volunteer.”

Now  _ that _ wasn’t suspicious at all. Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Just who is this ‘volunteer’?”

Fury steepled his fingers under his chin and gave Tony a long look. “Bucky Barnes.”

There were few times in his life that Tony was left at a total loss for words. This was one of those times. Fury watched him impassively. Waiting. Long minutes passed.

“No,” Tony said at last. Fury opened his mouth to spout whatever retort he’d planned out, but the door behind Tony cracked open.

Tony swung around. Peter stood there, barefoot, wearing one of Tony’s own well-worn AC/DC t-shirts and drawstring sweatpants. Not Spider-Man. Just a teenage kid who’d seen too much, with bruises under his eyes and red scrapes on his neck that had been bleeding not an hour ago. Peter looked between Tony and the screen.

“I’m-I’m sorry, sir. I mean, Tony. I thought—I, I’m sorry. Is everything OK?”

“Everything’s fine, Petey. Are  _ you _ alright?”

Peter ran a hand back through his hair. “Yeah, yeah, I just had this weird feeling, I’m sorry. I’m gonna,” he pointed over his shoulder. “Thanks, sorry, bye.” He slipped out. The door clicked shut.

“Tony,” Fury said. His gruff voice was almost gentle. “If you can’t do this, I can ask Princess Shuri to take a stab at it.”

Tony shook his head and barked out a laugh as he turned back to the screen. “Don’t bullshit me, Fury. You’ve had her working on this too.”

“And she needs a human test subject, ‘too,’” Fury said. Shameless. “I could send Barnes to Wakanda, but I’d rather have  _ you _ figure this one out.”

“Why?” 

Fury snorted. “You know why. You want to modify the suppression unit for your kid, there, before things get outta hand. Try and tell me he’s not flipping shit after what he’s been through. From a political standpoint, I can tell you that we do not need another Enhanced with self-control issues.” Tony opened his mouth to snap back, but Fury held up a hand. “But from a personal standpoint, I’ll tell you this. It is highly fucked up, what Brock did to that boy. I’d like to know that we’ve done all we can to take care of our own. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

Fury could have pressed the point. Could have said Barnes hadn’t been in control of himself when he’d killed Tony’s parents. That he felt terrible remorse and a load of other perfectly true horseshit that changed nothing. But he didn’t. Fury was a smart guy. He knew Tony would fill in all those blanks himself.

Tony shielded his eyes with one hand; he disguised the movement by rubbing his forehead. 

As Peter’s body healed, the damage to his mind was going to become more evident. Tony wasn’t going to find another volunteer he was willing to risk to this extent. Barnes, though...he might not sleep too badly if Barnes’ heart accidentally stopped beating.

“Fine. Send him over. But he’d better be  _ alone.” _


	5. Trigger Finger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony confronts his demon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hell week = short chapter but I like it, I hope you do too.

Jean stayed upstairs to watch Peter while Tony went down to the workshop. His security had already brought Barnes in and sat him down amidst the flurry of machines and bric-a-brac. Three highly trained and thoroughly armed ex-military men stood guard outside the door.

It was just for show. Tony knew that. If the Winter Soldier decided he didn’t want to be there, he would leave.

It had been well over a year since they’d last seen each other, not counting Peter’s rescue. Barnes’ eyes met Tony’s when he entered the room. There was a seasick feeling somewhere around Tony’s lumbar spine that wouldn’t go away.  A mess of vipers twisted around in his stomach as he walked up next to the man who had killed his parents. They were so close, he could smell Barnes’ shampoo.

He should have brought in an assistant for the close-up work. But with Barnes on FBI’s, Interpol’s, and freaking America’s Most Wanted list, there was no one in the medical field he trusted.

This would be better. Fewer witnesses if something went wrong.

_Peter. You can do this for Peter._

Tony pulled up a virtual screen and tapped out a series of formulas.

“Show me vitals,” he said to his AI. A wide screen opened up, displaying Barnes’ vital functions.

“Right side view, brainstem and cerebellum. Top and side, limbic...yep. Got it.” He made adjustments so he could view everything he needed to at once, then retreated to his main workstation.

There. See? He could do this. Just ignore the body in the chair. It was a means to an end. A crash test dummy. Nothing more.

“Put your hair up,” he said to the screen in front of him. “It’s in the way.”

While Barnes _(the subject, the test subject)_ pulled his long hair into a ponytail, Tony used finger movement sensors to remotely guide Pokey, his multi-armed precision work robot, to lift the nanotech device. It looked like a dark gray ear cuff, because that was how Tony had designed it to look. Stimulus Suppression Unit: SSU, or Sue, as he’d begun to think of it. Pokey held it at the ready while two other arms came down to grip the base of Barnes’ skull so he wouldn’t jar things out of place.

Tony brought Sue into position at the curve of Barnes’ ear. At his gesture, four tiny pincers deployed from each side of the device. They wrapped around the antihelix of the ear, stretched to grasp the concha’s cartilage, and held fast. Barnes twitched, then settled. The device wouldn’t break skin, but it _would_ stay in place through a nuclear explosion.

 _Installation Successful,_ read the display.

Barnes glanced up at the floating screen, then looked straight ahead. His forehead was knotted up; his fingers clenched over the arms of the chair. Sweat trickled along his hairline. Hydra had used a knockoff version of his father’s supersoldier serum to enhance Barnes, then used some kind of tech to do brain-wipes on him. Guy was probably phobic of needles by this point.

Tony guided a four inch long, twelve gauge needle into place at the back right side of Barnes’ neck and drove it in without warning. Sensors brought the needle to a dead stop the moment its tip nudged against the spinal cord. Barnes’ metal hand crushed the arm of the chair, but he didn’t try to move, and that was all that mattered.

The needle’s inner tube retracted with a cylinder of excised flesh while the outer tube held the pathway open. Pokey threaded the stimulator nodes into the opening and added meditape to keep it all in place. Barnes trembled from head to feet, but he stayed put. It was hard not to notice that the man was terrified. His vitals were sprawled across the room, all demonstrating that precise fact. Yet he sat there, docile as a lab rat while he got jabbed full of wires by a man who had once tried to kill him.

It didn’t add up. Was Fury’s mission really that important to Barnes?

“Aaand syncing now,” Tony said under his breath.

He activated the sync. Sue began analysis of Barnes’ brainwave patterns. The screen flashed green within a minute.

_Synchronization Complete._

Barnes’ heart rate slowed considerably. His muscles all relaxed. Tony waited until Sue had brought his vitals down to a steady baseline. So far, so good.

“Add a dash of lemon, a little basil,” Tony hummed.

He sent a mild electrical pulse to Barnes’ brainstem.

Barnes’ eyes widened; his mouth fell open around a low groan. His hips lifted off the chair. The stimulator nodes had done their job, activating the subject’s sexual response.

Now to shut it down.

That had been Fury’s first criterion. Before anything else, he wanted a device that could put the brakes on sexual arousal. Which, hey, Tony wasn’t one to judge (was absolutely going to judge and never let Fury live it down), but it gave them a nice, safe-ish starting point.

Sue had detected the arousal. Stats flashed across multiple screens. Barnes’ eyelids fluttered as Sue kicked into gear, suppressing his body’s responses. Heartrate, O2, respiration all remained within acceptable limits.

“Hunh,” Tony grunted. “Might not stop your heart today, after all.”

Barnes’ eyes turned in Tony’s direction; his forehead knotted, but he said nothing.

There were a lot of parameters to test. Sue needed to learn which responses to curb and which to allow. Fight or flight was there for a reason, after all, and a very good reason when you’re sending spies into hostile territory.

When it came time for the next phase of testing, Tony glanced up at his security team. The leader gave a faint nod.

Fear response. This was where he might start a grassfire. If he accidentally triggered Barnes’ psycho-assassin personality, he was prepared to blow an electrical charge into the fucker’s brain faster than you can say emergency backup plan. And it would be self defense. (It would. He’d explained this to himself over and over.) But he didn’t want it to come to that, because Peter needed this device to _work._

Eyes on his screens, Tony directed several pulses of electricity straight into Barnes’ amygdala.

The result was instantaneous. Barnes cried out and crawled halfway up the chair. Tony’s finger hovered over the charge detonation trigger, but the world’s deadliest assassin wasn’t preparing to attack. Pressing down on the arms of the chair, Barnes curled his legs into his chest and shook like he was freezing to death. All his vitals blew into the red. Pleas spilled from his lips in mumbled Russian, a language Tony spoke fluently.

_“Sir, please, please, do it to me, don’t hurt him please”_

Tony chewed over the problem. Sue should have started to tamp down the misfiring brain signals by now. He scowled at the screen where he’d laid out Sue’s primary controls.

_“Commander let me take his place, sir I can satisfy your men”_

_Woah,_ TMI right there.

Tony searched the screen. What was he missing?

 _“Ready, t-to! TO COMPLY!”_ The last words were a howl. Barnes stumbled out of the chair and fell to the floor, on his elbows and knees. The security lead stepped into the room, gun pointed.

“OUT!” Tony yelled. The man backpedaled out of the room.

_“Stop me...stop me…”_

Crying. The Winter Soldier was crying. Pleading in English, now, each word sobbed into the floor.

_“Run, I can’t...I can’t stop I can’t stopIcantstopplease run please RUN”_

Tony wiped sweat from his forehead. The neural stimulator wasn’t sending pulses anymore; this was all Barnes.

 _Prisoner of war for sixty-nine years,_ whispered a voice in the back of Tony’s brain. _Prisoner of the men you found circled around Peter._

There! There it was: a particular spot in Barnes’ brain pattern that was doing a zig while Sue tried to zag. Tony wrote in a new program on the fly, watched Sue regroup and send just the right signals to counteract the flood of neurotransmitters.

Bit by bit, Barnes’ heartrate dropped. It had topped out around 280.

Tony watched, stone-faced, as Barnes sat back on his heels. Head bowed, the man wiped his face on his sleeve, then pushed to his feet. All three guards had their guns trained on him as he returned to the chair and sat down. Shudders still racked through his body. Blood had leaked out from beneath the meditape on his neck and soaked his shirt collar.

But he’d gone right back into the chair.

A long minute passed in silence.

“Why are you _here?”_ Tony’s voice came out scathing.

Barnes’ eyes flicked sideways, not quite landing on him. “Fury said you needed a test subject. So you can help that kid.”

Tony just stared, his ready retort (you won’t find forgiveness here) dead on his tongue.

“What,” he said.

“The kid we extracted from Hydra. The spider kid.” Barnes turned his head and looked Tony straight in the eyes. “It’s to help him, isn’t it?”

He asked the question in his usual, dead tone. (thick from crying)

Wore his usual, dead look. (eyes rimmed in red)

The way he spoke, the flat intonation, had always allowed Tony to think of him as less human. But right now, he seemed more like a man shuffling under the weight of too much history.

And none of that mattered, because Barnes had just made direct reference to _Peter._

Tony gripped his worktable and leaned forward, baring his teeth. “Listen to me _very_ carefully. If you so much as _think_ about him again, I will send a million volts through your brain and flash-fry you from the inside out.”

Barnes didn’t react to the threat, but he released Tony from that unbearable eye contact. He relaxed back into the chair and looked straight ahead. Waiting.

Muscles in his jaw twitching, Tony returned his attention to the monitors.

He had work to do.

 

—

 

After Barnes left, Fury came by to have the cleared-for-duty SSU installed on his own ear. On a normal day, Tony would have been wild to know what kind of mission involved anti-Viagra and Nick Fury.

This was not a normal day. Tony set the man up and sent him packing.

Once he was finally, blissfully alone, he spent several more hours working on Sue 2.0. This version was thinner, lighter, and should be able to take on all of Peter’s night terrors. He’d stay close for a few days, just in case.

Friday kept him updated on Peter. Happy had arrived with the rest of his shopping. Jean was gone and Mae had come over after getting off work. She wouldn’t move in until the end of the week, which gave them a few more days to get those panic attacks under control. Mae and Peter were setting up his new room. Friday reported crying, but no incidents.

By the time Tony made it upstairs himself, the sun was down and he was ready to collapse. He nearly _did_ collapse when something tan and four-legged skidded around the corner to greet him.

A dog. Had Mae brought a _dog_ over? This thing was huge. He knew fuck-all about dogs, but everyone knows what a golden retriever looks like and he was looking at one right now.

“Mortimer!” Peter’s voice came from down the hall.

_Mortimer?_

The dog danced in a happy circle. It slipped in place like a cartoon character as it tried to gain traction on the polished wood floor, then ran in the direction of Peter’s voice, shaggy tail circling like a helicopter blade.

There was fur on the floor. _Fur._ A little cluster of it rolled like a tumbleweed in the wake of the dog’s departure.

“Friday, why is there a dog in my home?” Tony asked. Had he really thought he could get through this hell day without a drink? He went to the kitchen island to pour himself a tumbler of scotch.

“Mr. Hogan bought it for Peter, boss,” Friday said.

Tony set down both glass and bottle, laid his hands flat on the counter, and cocked his head to one side.

“Come again?”

“You gave Mr. Hogan directions to buy everything Mae said Peter liked,” Friday reminded him. As if he somehow could have forgotten this.

“Ah. Ah-hah. I said every _thing._ That is not a _thing._ That is a—a biological hazard, for one. It is _shed_ -ding on my _floor._ And where is it going to _poop?_ Hm? Is it diaper trained? Because I do not have a fire hydrant on this floor, to my knowledge.”

“I don’t think it needs a fire hydrant to relieve itself, boss. It did fine on the balcony about an hour ago.”

Tony made a sound that the uncultured observer might have mistaken for a petulant whine. He filled the tumbler to the brim and drank it entirely too fast.

This was fine. Everything was fine. As long as Happy hadn’t actually _told_ Peter that the dog was staying forever, he could still wriggle out of this. Rental dogs were a thing, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Narrator’s voice:** rental dogs were _not_ a thing.
> 
> Author’s note/PSA: I’ll do hella fucked up shit to my characters, but in my stories all dogs live happy and carefree eternal lives with no major injuries or trauma ever. Because dogs.


	6. Brick by Brick (or: Calm Before the Storm)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter and Tony get some well-deserved healing time.

When Tony (fortified by single malt Scotch) walked back to Peter’s new bedroom, a plausible story about their highly temporary, in-no-way-permanent rental dog ready on his lips, he found Peter, Mae, and the shedding intruder on the bed.

The dog’s lower body was on Mae’s lap, its shoulders and head on Peter’s. It was shamelessly enjoying a belly rub from Mae, while Peter cradled its head in both hands and stared into its eyes with a sappy grin on his face. He scrubbed his fingers roughly against the dog’s cheeks. Its dangling tongue flopped over his knuckles like a slice of bologna. It sneezed up into Peter’s face...and Peter laughed.

He _laughed._

He wiped his wet face on his sleeve while Mae made grossed out sounds. The whole scene was such a sharp contrast to everything that had occurred in the last week, Tony just stood there, staring.

The dog noticed him first. It lurched out of both their laps and shook itself (fur, good god, fur went _everywhere),_ then stretched like it owned the place. Insolent little punk.

Peter and Mae saw him next. A look fell across Mae’s face, all dewy eyed as if Tony was some kind of saint. Peter’s was no better. The echo of that smile still lingered on his lips. His first real smile since who knew when.

“I can’t believe you did this f-for me,” he got out. His voice wavered over the words, then he choked. He covered his face with one hand. Mae laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, careful of the wounds still healing.

The dog turned back to Peter. It tilted its face down and tucked its forehead into his neck. It just stayed like that until Peter put an arm around it and hugged it close, crying into its fur.

Mae looked up, caught Tony’s gaze and mouthed, _thank you._

And that was how Tony got a dog.

 

—-

 

The next few days were a blur for Peter. Mae was moving in this weekend and it all seemed like a dream. _Tony Stark,_ his idol, his hero had taken him in, given him everything he could have dreamed of, brought his family back together, and Peter had done nothing to deserve this. He was broken, he knew. _Everyone_ knew. Tony had already modified the force-field necklace into a dog collar just so Peter wouldn’t accidentally hurt Mortimer if he had a bad dream. There was nothing normal about this situation.

He couldn’t even remember how it had felt to be Peter Parker _before_ meeting Eddie. That person had never even been kissed. He’d been clean.

The device Tony had fitted on his ear helped. When he’d see Eddie from the corner of his eye, or wake up to Venom’s demonic voice and his heart trying to leap out of his ribcage, he could actually _feel_ the adrenaline rinsing out of his system as the device worked to counteract the panic.

Really it just got him to the crying part faster. He was dead sick of crying. He hadn’t cried this much when he was actually _with_ Eddie.

And that was another thing.

He missed Eddie. Or maybe it was Venom that he missed so much. Either way, he’d kept that little tidbit to himself. He hadn’t even told Dr. Grey. He knew it was sick and he _hated_ himself for it, but that didn’t take away the emptiness they’d left inside him. They’d carved out a bloody, horrible nest in his heart, and now it was just this open wound.

He wanted to feel better. If not for himself, then for Tony and Mae. There were good things happening all around him now, and it was as if some protective film kept him from fully touching them.

 

—

 

Helping Tony Stark in his workshop (he called it “the birthing room”) was a dream come true. Peter was sure that he would never get used to it. He kept thinking, as he often did, that he would wake up next to Eddie and realize the last week had been an escapist dream.

Tony kept a mix of energetic music playing. He wore a sleeveless undershirt; the glowing reactor on his chest shone white through the fabric. He was a lot more buff than Peter had realized. There’d been a time not too long ago when that would have made him crazy.

Right now, it made him remember things he was trying desperately to forget.

Tony’s mind, though? That was something Peter could get giddy about without restraint. He lost track of time while he worked on the tasks he was given. Tony was working on a new version of his Iron Man suit, and even though Peter’s involvement was menial assembly of parts that Tony could’ve done a hundred times faster, he was awestruck to be involved in this at all.

“Hey. Peter,” Tony said, not looking up from his tabletop of assorted parts. Whatever he was cleaning out had leaked oil all over his hands.

“Sir?” Peter winced; Tony had told him several times not to call him that. The man didn’t seem to notice the slip, though; he had that zoned-out look he got when deep in thought. Tony lifted his hand toward Peter, and

  


 

“-ear me? Peter? Hey. Do you hear me?” Dark chocolate eyes, inches from his face. Peter reeled back, put a hand out to catch his balance and touched the floor. He was on his knees?

“Daddy?” Peter heard his voice as though he had cotton in his ears. He knew what he’d said wasn’t right, but he couldn’t think of why.

“OK, don’t move. Stay riiight there—” Tony’s fingers flicked through the air; he looked at something above Peter’s head and let out a thoughtful hum.

The fog slowly cleared from Peter’s head. He remembered where he was, and on the heels of that, realized he’d just called Tony by the title Eddie and Venom had forced him to call them. Sickness jolted up his stomach.

“Friday, you’d better be recording these,” Tony said.

“I have them, boss,” the AI chirped.

“What is happening,” Peter breathed. His voice shook around the need to puke.

Tony’s gaze remained fixed above his head; his fingers moved through the air like he was typing on a ten-key.

“Well, you knelt in front of me and things got kinda awkward, and it looks...like...OK. It wasn’t Sue, but something in your brainwave patterns completely changed between one second and the next. Do you remember what triggered it?”

Tony sounded detached, clinical, and Peter tried to make himself feel the same way. He thought back, then shook his head.

“Just, you said my name.”

_And then reached out a hand stained in black grease. Palm up, you crooked two fingers at me—_

Peter turned sideways and vomited his lunch onto the floor.

“Oh god. I’m so sorry,” Peter gasped, as soon as the heaving stopped.

“Yeah, I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that, because there is nothing normal about what just happened inside your brain. I’d be seasick too.”

Tony helped him up and moved him to a chair. Peter sat back gratefully, though he winced as something sharp nicked at his arm. Looking down, he saw that the entire left arm of the chair had been crushed so that shards of metal stuck out in all directions. He put his hands in his lap and focused on breathing.

“Am I broken?”

The question just slipped out. Tony brushed his hair back and laid a cool hand against his cheek.

“Join the club, Petey. We’re all broken. We just do the best we can.”

Tony turned, flicked his fingers and a trio of screens appeared midair. Peter had to close his eyes; his head was swimming. A while later Tony came up beside him and touched the cuff on his ear.

“I know how to keep it from happening again,” was all he said, before he tapped the ear cuff and started air-typing again. Peter gave him a beat, but when Tony didn’t continue to explain, he had to ask.

“How to keep _what_ from happening? Do you know what it was?”

“Uh-huh,” Tony hummed. Again, went silent until Peter spoke up.

“Tell me!”

Terror coursed through him the moment that order left his mouth. All the scars on his back tightened at once, the ghost of claws tearing him open.

 _What did you just say to me?_ Eddie asked in a dangerously calm tone.

But the half-image of Eddie’s face melted away, along with the panic. Tony and the workshop came back into focus and Peter realized he was panting. Sue had done its job once again.

His aborted panic attack hadn’t gone unnoticed. Tony’s hand covered the back of his, thumb stroking the skin.

 _He’s not Eddie. He won’t hurt me. He won’t hurt me._ Peter repeated the chant over and over as he shuddered in a deep breath.

“Please,”

_not sir, don’t say sir he told you not to_

“W-would you t-tell me…”

Tony’s sigh cut him off. “It looks like the kneeling was a programmed response; your brain went into a dissociative state. Don’t freak out, because I know exactly how to counter it. I already rigged the first Sue to deal with this, just didn’t think to put it in yours.”

“I’m _programmed?”_ Peter squeaked.

“Didn’t I just say not to freak out? Stop freaking out. We’re taking care of it.”

Peter bit his tongue. He tried very hard not to cry while Tony added new formulas to the Sue device. The tears still came, but they were quiet and he could pretend Tony wouldn’t notice them.

“OK,” Tony said after a while. “There. If it happens again, Sue’ll shut it right down. Let’s get you upstairs.”

“Wait, sir! Mr.—Tony,” Peter stammered. “If it won’t happen again, I can keep working, sir.” He winced. “Tony.” He saw the denial on Tony’s lips and added, “Please. I can keep working. I want to work.”

Tony looked him up and down. Finally, he nodded. “OK, Spiderino. Let’s get to work.”

 

—

  


Peter fed Mortimer while Tony made dinner for the two of them, then he and Tony sat down at the table for their last dinner alone together. Come tomorrow, Mae would be sharing the table with them. They would be like a real family. It seemed so distant and impossible, Peter didn’t dwell on the thought.

“So, this ‘Mortimer’ name,” Tony said. “I gotta know where that comes from.”

Peter reached under the table to scratch behind Mortimer’s ears. The dog gently mouthed his hand, which brought a weak smile to his lips. “It’s from this old Cary Grant movie, Arsenic and Old Lace—”

“Oh, uh, is this,” Tony waved his fork in a circle and grinned, “like, a _really_ old movie? Like _Empire Strikes Back_ kind of old?”

“Yeah, but it’s older even than that,” Peter confirmed. For some reason this made Tony laugh.

They wound up watching the movie together on the couch. One of Tony’s robots actually brought them popcorn, which was beyond ridiculous. Tony kept trying to get Mortimer the dog to pay attention to his namesake, Cary Grant’s character Mortimer Brewster, on the screen. Peter played along with it; he lifted Mortimer’s paws and pantomimed whenever Grant spoke.

Relaxed-Mode Tony was amazing company. His commentary on the movie got Peter laughing more than once. Peter even surprised himself by making a pun (Tony rubbed his temples as if it gave him a headache). 

It occurred to Peter that this—the jokes, the easy smile—was an echo of how he’d used to be.

Maybe that person was still alive in there, somewhere.

 

—

 

Over the following weeks, Tony watched Peter like a hawk. Jean came over daily for sessions. Progress was slow, but it was still progress.

He wasn’t his previous, chatterbox self. His eyes were often swollen from crying, and Friday reported that he woke up screaming every night. Tony had let Peter climb into bed with him one more time, but then _he_ hadn’t been able to sleep, and not because Mortimer thought his shins were the comfiest part of the bed.

Peter was a very attractive young man. His body had filled out since they’d first met, and yeah, Tony noticed—he’d have to be blind not to. Now that the initial trauma of the rescue had worn off, now that they were working in close proximity daily, he noticed even more. So he set a no-more-sleepovers rule and pretended not to see the hurt on Peter’s face. Anyway, he had a feeling if Mae caught them in bed together she’d be more of a stab-first, ask-questions-later kind of gal, and Tony was quite attached to all of his parts.

Dinner with the two of them was...he didn’t hate it. He was sort of afraid to like it too much. Good things had a tendency to explode in his face. But Mae was a doll and Peter the perfect gentleman, and Tony may have “accidentally” let his hand dangle under the table with a strip of chicken once or twice for Mortimer.

What intrigued him the most about their patchwork family unit was Peter’s relationship with Friday. The AI warmed to Peter more than it ever had to someone besides himself. Friday had, in fact, started _covering_ for Peter when he snuck Mortimer into the workshop.

Peter knew very well that the dog was ABSOLUTELY NOT allowed to be in the workshop, since every place Mortimer went wound up decorated with golden tumbleweed offspring, and those offspring multiplied into trillions of fluff bunnies, and those little buns nested inside _ev-e-ry-thing._ (Tony had explained all of this to Peter in excruciating detail, with much arm-waving.) Last time he’d put on his Iron Man suit, he had wound up with fur _in his mouth._

Peter bent over backwards to please him in every other thing; in fact, no-dog-in-the-birthing-room was the _only_ rule of Tony’s that Peter had broken more than once. It was painfully obvious how much the dog helped him. The kid laughed, worked, even _breathed_ more easily when Mortimer was around. So Tony bitched and moaned every time he caught it, but not enough to actually stop it from happening.

If Tony Stark was the god of robots, Peter Parker was shaping up to be the...well, still pretty intern-level, but he had a strong affinity toward biochemistry. Most days were spent with both Tony and Friday tutoring Peter on the biological interface used in all the Iron Man suits, and in Peter’s own Spiderman suit, which Tony was rebuilding from scratch.

Mae attempted to hang out with them exactly once. She lasted half an hour before the novelty of Tony’s workshop wore off and boredom sank in. So it was just him and Peter, every day.

He’d never shared his workspace with someone else like this. His father had _hated_ for Tony to be in his space, yet Tony found himself more at ease when Peter was around than when he wasn’t. He even built a new hover bot (Peter named it The Mortilator) which zipped around the lab at all hours, vacuuming up dog fur; as long as the emotional support fluff factory could stay in the lab, Peter never wanted to leave.

The kid was brilliant, and Tony wasn’t going to let that talent sit idle. He’d made that mistake once, and they were still paying for it. Peter most of all.

 

—

 

Months passed. Issues arose. Compromises were made.

At Mae’s insistence, Peter had called his old friend Ned for the first time in close to a year; he’d deliberately stopped speaking to Ned after he’d run away from state custody. To his immense relief, Ned was willing to forgive. Everything had changed, and he didn’t feel the same connection to Ned that he used to, but it meant a lot to him that they were speaking again.

A single issue loomed larger each day: he needed to finish high school, but where? His old school in Queens was a fair drive from Stark tower, but if he enrolled in a new school, there would be a whole new load of stress that comes from starting in a new place. Besides, he’d learned more in Tony Stark’s workshop than in 3 years of public high school.

The solution was a private tutor. To his relief, it worked well. _Really_  well. Peter completed his senior year in three months and was applying to colleges by December. During the wait, he spent fourteen hours a day in the workshop. He was able to hold a cogent conversation with Tony on the subject of neuroelectric relays. He could build workable simulations using the holo-grid.

He still couldn’t look in the mirror. Hadn’t, not once, since the rescue. Dr. Grey knew. Mae and Tony did not. They had an in-house barber, for god’s sake; Peter didn’t even _have_ to look at himself. Other people took care of his appearance and he didn’t have to see the sorry runt who had been held captive, raped, and tortured for months on end.

His body had healed, for the most part. His ribs twinged when he turned the wrong way, and the deepest claw wounds on his back remained tight. It was the first time since the spider bite that he hadn’t recovered one hundred percent from an injury. He didn’t know why, and he was afraid to tell Tony. So he dealt with it.

Tony dragged Peter into more and more social situations—walking Mortimer out on public streets, get-togethers with Pepper and Rhodey—and he became increasingly aware that he was, physically at least, capable of going back out into the world. So when the realization came, it was less an epiphany and more a slowly rising curtain:

He _had_ to get back to being Spider-Man.

He could still stop a train with his hands; he couldn’t just convalesce here while other people were getting mugged and murdered on the streets of New York. But when Tony caught him exiting the elevator on the ground floor, wearing his new and improved spidersuit underneath hoodie and sweats, they had their first real argument.

It dragged on for days. Peter accused Tony of keeping him locked in a tower like a short haired Rapunzel. Tony accused Peter of more humiliating things, like “not being ready” and “needing more time to recover.” Peter pointed out that Tony couldn’t keep him bundled up until he was 18 then just turn him loose and expect it to go well.

In the end, Peter won—with caveats. He had to be back before 8pm, and Sue would be upgraded to include GPS tracking in case something happened to the new spidersuit. Peter grumbled that he was being chipped like a dog, but inside, he was relieved. He didn’t want to ever be in a situation again where Tony couldn’t find him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Q: So, whatcha writing?  
> A: Traumatic shit, daddy kink, angst, puppies. Y’know.  
> Q: Um. Why?  
> A: If I don’t, I will have a total nervous breakdown.  
> Q:  
> A:  
> Q: Goodnight.  
> A: Please don’t leave me here. I can’t find the exit.
> 
>  
> 
> Here’s where I [**Tumbl**](http://subverbaldreams.tumblr.com).
> 
> And here’s where I **[Twit](http://twitter.com/SubverbalD)**.
> 
> I’d be interested to know your thoughts as you’re going along. I hope you like it!
> 
> I know it’s taking some time to get to the mutual pining phase, but for Tony to not be a creep there’s some more stuff that’s gotta happen in between. Though some would say it’s never ok. I’m assuming if you’ve made it this far, you’ll cope 😅. There’ll still be a power imbalance, I think, cuz I just enjoy that. I’ll roll with it as it comes.


	7. Familiar Faces on a Winter Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spider-Man returns...and new enemies emerge.

_I can do this. I can do this._ Peter kept the mantra on repeat in his head.

Six o’clock and the streets were packed. There were so many _people._ Twice, already, Peter had felt Sue kick in. Once when a brawny, rough looking man gave him an openly hungry stare. The other when someone stood too close behind him at a crosswalk, their breath hot on his neck.

Defeated thoughts kept trying to push into his consciousness. That he’d be a dribbling lunatic without the tech Tony had strapped to his ear. That he was a joke and should just go back to being Tony’s kept pet.

He pushed those thoughts as deep as they would go. Dr. Grey had told him to expect it. To fight it. God, but he would give anything to have Mortimer with him.

His “spider-sense” had gone to hell after Eddie had taken him in. He’d discussed it with Dr. Grey, and he liked her take: that being in constant danger had probably overloaded it, and long-term exposure to normal circumstances would allow it to recalibrate.

Peter listened with his whole body to the world around him. When his “spider-sense” gave a ping, he walked in that direction.

Ten minutes later, Spider-Man stopped a convenience store robbery and left the perp webbed to the side of the building. The lady at the counter was so excited, she took a photo of him as he climbed up to the roof of the five-story building to sling his first web in eight months.

Spider-Man had officially moved to Manhattan.

 

__

 

Peter felt more like his old self, now that he was inside the suit, than he had since Eddie.

No one could see his face. No one knew who he was, or what had been done to him. All they saw was the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man from Queens.

Jokes and banter spilled from his tongue almost as easily as they had a year ago. He flew between buildings, and once the adrenaline kicked in, he hardly even noticed the tight scars across his back. A weight that he hadn’t been aware of lifted from his shoulders as the wind rushed past him and the scenery blurred. Snow began to fall as the sun went down. Peter reveled in the rush of fat snowflakes past his face. They reminded him of the stars in space, when the Star Trek Enterprise would jump to warp speed. Just billions of streaks of light.

Three times he followed his instinct, and three times he left bad guys neatly wrapped up for the police to collect.

He was on his way home, mask off and suit hidden under civvies, when his hair stood on end for the fourth time.

 

—

 

“Mr. Stark.” Fury’s stern visage filled the floating screen beside the worktable in Tony’s lab, where a holo-touch image displayed the inner arm of his newest suit.

“Mr. Fury,” Tony quipped. “Did your dishwasher stop running again?”

“No,” Fury said. His immunity to banter was astounding. “I want to talk to you about this.” He tapped the SSU, which clung to his right ear like a goth fashion statement.

“Sue giving you guff, buddy? Don’t let her get the upper hand; she will _ruin_ you.” Let no one say Tony gave up the snark without a fight.

Fury’s eyebrows lifted. “Well, maybe it’s time she got a friend.”

Tony went still for a moment, then resumed tinkering with the holographic arm. He’d been at it since Peter left, trying to keep himself busy so he wouldn’t be tempted to spy on ~~his~~ the kid.

“Who’s wearing it this time? You do know, it’s gonna start to look weird if I keep giving you jewelry and we haven’t even had our first date.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Fury lean back from the camera. “It’s time we get you up to speed. What would you say if I told you I have established contact with a race of interdimensional travelers who have a vested interest in helping to protect humanity from a symbiote invasion?”

“I’d say it sounds like another Tuesday.”

At that, Fury cracked a tiny smile. “And let’s say these people want connections in exchange for their support. They want to get to know the most powerful man in our version of the U.S.—”

Tony lifted a hand, palm out. _“‘Our’_ version of the U.S.?”

Slow blink. Did Fury even _know_ how much that irked him? “The United States that exists in our dimension. It appears we are not as unique as we thought.”

Of course not. He’d met Asgardians and alien invaders; a parallel earth was hardly surprising.

“And your space man wants to meet the President and sucker his tentacles into Uncle Sam’s head? Steer the country from behind the throne?”

“No,” Fury answered simply. “He wants to meet you.”

Ah.

Tony pursed his lips and drummed his fingers against the tabletop.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with you commissioning a wearable device that blocks sexual arousal, hypnotic suggestion, and cognitive dissociation. Would it?”

The question was rhetorical, and Fury knew it. “Make sure the one you build for yourself doesn’t look like an ear cuff.”

“Aw,” Tony pouted. “Afraid I’ll bite your style?” He knew what Fury was getting at, though, and Fury ignored the sass.

“How’s the kid?”

At this, Tony looked away from the screen. “Getting better. It’s slow.”

“Does he know about the symbiote threat?”

Tony’s head shot up. “NO. And if you tell him, I swear—”

Fury raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just seeing where things stand, Tony. He’s gonna have to know, eventually.”

Tony shook his head. “Not if I can help it.”

 

__

 

Peter kept his eyes peeled as he walked, hands in his pockets. The road was empty here, dark with most of the street lights out.

His sensitive ears caught the sounds before he could see what made them. A thump. The rustle of cloth. A grunt of effort, or of pain.

Tucked just inside the space between two buildings, something moved. It was white as the newly fallen snow on the ground, but this was skin, not snow. Three men: two of them as pale as frost.

One of the bleached-white men was stocky, with short black hair and a sleeveless shirt that made _no_ sense in the freezing weather. The other was tall and brawny, like a bouncer, and had long, golden hair. That was all Peter could see from this distance. Together, the two of them held the third, struggling man against the wall.

 _“Your...Master won’t be happy with you…”_ he said, voice strained.

“Who will tell him?” This from the Bouncer dude.

Stocky gripped the chin of their victim and shoved it upward. His hips pushed forward as he buried his face into the exposed throat.

The pinned man jerked. A low sound came from deep in his chest. He writhed and cried out, ragged moans pouring one on top of the other.

It didn’t sound like pain at all. It sounded like _fucking._

Peter’s muscles locked up. Black dots encroached on his vision.

_Run. Run, run, run, run get out of here get out NOW_

_“Stop.”_

Peter’s heart lurched as he realized the word had just dropped from his own lips. His voice had not been loud, but Bouncer’s head shot up. His gaze found Peter unerringly in the darkness. He laughed, leaned insolently against the wall, and gestured toward the other two men.

“There is no stopping him now, pretty bite,” he called out. He had some kind of thick, rolling accent. Russian, maybe. “But, you are welcome to try,” he added. The slant of his grin was a clear challenge.

Peter’s entire body trembled like a stack of wine glasses on a busy train track. He swallowed, hard, forced himself to breathe as Sue battled the shrieking blackness that tried to envelop him. It took all his strength just to hold his ground. If he walked away now, he might as well go back to hiding in Stark tower. Bouncer watched him shake; he put his elbow against the wall and propped his cheek on his fist, a full-body pantomime of condescension.

Stocky pulled away from his victim’s throat with a deep gasp. He slammed the man into the wall so his head cracked against the bricks, then threw him at his companion and said something in another language.

_Stop them. Move! Stop them!_

Bouncer stroked their victim’s chest. He kept his eyes on Peter. Grinning at his helplessness.

Footsteps pounded down the sidewalk from Peter’s left. He glanced toward the runner:  a tall, bearded man dressed all in black with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t look familiar, but there was something about the way he moved that tickled Peter’s memory.

“Bucky!” the man yelled. “Amon, I know that’s you—get the hell off him!”

As soon as Peter heard his voice, he knew where he’d seen that run before. A brawny blonde wearing red, white, and blue. A German airport, two years ago. Peter’s first real battle with the Avengers.

Steve Rogers made it to the trio and threw a punch. Stocky didn’t move until the last second, but when he did, he _blurred._ Steve went flying and slammed into the wall.

Peter was running before he’d even decided to. He hit Stocky with a web, sticking his forearm to the wall. Bouncer threw the man they’d assaulted—that must be Bucky—to the ground, and did a blur of his own. In the next breath, burly arms wrapped around Peter’s torso; a large hand pinned his head back against the man’s chest. Peter struggled, but the man’s arms hardly budged, and _that_ shouldn’t be possible; Peter had fought Captain America and held his own. There was something _really_ off about these guys, something more than the ice-white skin and creepy neck fetish.

 _“Relax, tiny one,”_ Bouncer whispered in Peter’s ear. _“Relax.”_

And what was crazy? Peter _did_ relax. The tension drained out of his limbs. The voices around him became echoey. Silken strands of golden hair brushed across Peter’s face. The man holding him smelled like winter: animal furs and cold mountains and rutting face-down in the dirt.

The impressions washed over Peter in a wave, then were gone.

His heart tripped and sped up, and the world sped up with it. Inside himself, he felt everything falling back to baseline. He was familiar with the sensation: it meant Sue had just kicked in to counter...something. That hadn’t been a panic attack. He didn’t know _what_ that had been.

His vision cleared to reveal Steve, the hat knocked off and his hair mussed. He knelt in an inch of snow, passive, with one of Stocky’s hands on his neck. Up close, Peter could see that Stocky wasn’t your average lowlife, either. With a face like his, he should’ve been a model, or an actor. So why was he in a back alley, bullying Steve Rogers’ friend?

 _“Ja ves ka,_ Amon?”

The cultured, male voice came from behind their little group. Stocky’s head jerked up; he let go of Steve and backed away a step. Bouncer‘s arms tightened until Peter’s ribs ached.

Stocky began to speak rapidly in a gruff, rolling language, but the new voice _tsked_ once, and he shut his mouth with a click.

“Creed. Release him,” the voice said, this time in English.

Bouncer’s thick arms unwound from Peter, who took several quick steps away from him and turned to face this new threat.

A man with auburn hair tied into a loose ponytail, his flesh the color of pure snow. Heavy-lidded eyes and a feline jaw. His face was young, thirty at the most, but the eyes seemed older. _Mob boss,_ Peter thought. That wasn’t quite right, but it was the best he had. This guy was bad news on legs.

“Are you hurt, young man?” He advanced on Peter as he spoke. His pale gray trenchcoat parted with each step. He was dressed to the nines in a suit that matched the coat, and this only added to Peter’s mob-boss theory. Who would he be? Gambino? Could he be Italian? He looked...holy crap. If he didn’t have that “about to bite your hand clean off” look in his eyes, he’d be the hottest dude Peter had seen in his life. The distance between them had closed before Peter realized that question had been directed at him.

“No. No, I’m not hurt,” he said tensely, then pointed toward the sprawled lump that was Bucky. “But he is. You people need to leave. Now.” Didn’t help that his pointing hand shook. Cap still hadn’t moved from his kneeling position.

“Amon and Creed were just leaving,” the Boss said. His gaze didn’t flicker from Peter’s, but the words must have been an order because the other two dudes walked away faster than you could say “pink slip.” The Boss was close enough to touch, now. That same bitingly cold scent surrounded him, like a window open into endless winter.

Peter shouldn’t have been able to see his eyes so well in the darkness, but he could. They were amber, pupils small as though it was already bright for him. The color in the iris was in constant motion, flowing back and forth like stirred sap.

“Are you guys, like, aliens?” Peter blurted, backing up one step, then another. Hadn’t anyone heard of personal space? “Cuz, you know, the eyes?” He swirled his fingers by way of demonstration. “That’s pretty cool. Maybe need to get in the sun more, though, y’know? Cuz lack of Vitamin D can make you depressed.” The words came faster and more stressed as the man advanced on him. “Great outfit, by the way. You don’t shop off the rack, do...you…”

Peter trailed off at the touch of cold fingers on his throat. He hadn’t even noticed the man’s hand move.

Ease and comfort poured like warm honey through his veins, head to toe. All the anxiety was gone. Just gone. Peter slumped, relieved. He’d been so freaked out.

“Tell me your name,” the Boss said. He had a really nice voice, too. Soothing and rich. His fingers trailed up Peter’s neck to caress the curve of his ear.

“Peter…Parker...”

“And where did you get this ear cuff, Peter Parker?”

Peter’s breath hitched.

“Tony…”

The street came back into focus. His limbs shook as the unnatural calm rinsed out of his system, a sensation like tepid water spilling down his body.

“...S-Sta— _stop it!”_

Sue had kicked in yet again, leaving him normalized and scared as hell. He threw both arms up, knocking the man’s hand away. Peter stepped back, wrists up and ready to shoot his webs.

“Stay back,” he commanded. It might have worked better if his voice didn’t break.

But the man stayed put, hands spread as if in surrender. “Of course, Mr. Parker. I only wanted to see your jewelry up close. It is so _unique.”_ His cupid’s-bow lips pulled in a cold smile when Peter automatically lifted a hand to the Sue device.

“Dude. Seriously. Get lost, you’re creeping me out.”

The Boss dipped his chin and his smile widened, though it grew no warmer. “As you like,” he said. He stepped to his left, where Steve Rogers still knelt, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Captain.”

Steve blinked a few times and looked around, dazed. “Where are Amon and—”

“Gone. I’ll deal with them. Tend to your friend.”

Steve’s head swung around, searching for the alley until his eyes lit on Bucky’s huddled form.

“Is this your version of diplomacy?” Steve asked, voice low and angry.

The Boss quirked an eyebrow at him. “I am doing your kind a favor, Captain Rogers. Doubly so, by protecting those too _weak_ to do it themselves.” He glanced toward Bucky’s slumped form and a haughty sneer pulled at his upper lip. “Have your men take better care not to provoke my kin. I may not be here to save him, next time. I only came to inform you that our labors have been successful. You’ll be cleared within the week.”

Steve’s eyes flickered upward, but stopped before he made eye contact. His jaw flexed.

A chill smirk crept across the Boss’s lips during the stretch of silence. Peter held his breath. Finally, the Boss said, “You’re welcome.”

He gave Peter another long, assessing look as he turned away.

Shadow ate over the far side of his face like hungry ghosts. It looked as though he was sinking sideways into a tar pit. He stepped right into it, turned his face toward the void…

And he was gone.

Peter stared, open-mouthed. The man had just _utterly_ vanished; even the sense of his presence was gone.

 _“What_ was _that?”_ His voice was an embarrassing squeak. He hardly cared.

“Nothing you need to know about, kid,” Steve said.

Now, _that_ ticked Peter off. “I think I _do_ need to know about it, actually, since creepy dude knows my _name_ now,” he said, then added, “with all due respect, Captain.” Just to be safe.

Steve was slow getting to his feet, so Peter got to Bucky first. The man was on his stomach, head turned to the side with eyes closed and blood on his neck. His jacket and gloves neatly hid that cool metal arm, but up close, Peter recognized him. He put his arms under Bucky’s shoulders and pulled him up so they were face-to-face.

Bucky moaned. His forehead creased and his eyelids parted just slightly. He put his hands on Peter’s shoulders, as if for balance. Peter started to lift him, but Bucky wasn’t looking to stand up. He pulled Peter in close, wrapped a steel hand around the back of his head, and pressed their lips together.

“Uh,” Peter said, but the second his mouth opened, it was filled with Bucky’s tongue.

This was...this was weird. Not scary, which was kind of surprising. But the kiss was nothing like Eddie. Instead of hurting him, with a too-long tongue and pointed teeth that cut his lips, Bucky’s mouth was soft and warm. Asking, not demanding. Peter stayed frozen until the other man’s breath puffed against his lips in a sigh.

_“Bucky!!!”_

Bucky’s lashes fluttered. He focused on Peter for the first time, then his eyes flew wide and he reared back.

“Jesus!”

“N-no, just me,” Peter said faintly. He lifted an unsteady hand to touch his lips. They felt oversensitized from the scratch of Bucky’s beard stubble.

Shock scrawled across Bucky’s face. He pulled away from Peter, wobbled, and fell on his ass. “I’m so sorry,” he gasped, lifting the back of his hand to cover his mouth. “I’m so sorry! Shit.”

“Yeah, uh...woah.” Peter’s normally quick comebacks were at a complete standstill. Had he seriously just made out with the Winter Soldier?

Steve took Bucky’s elbow and helped him to his feet, then spread his hands between Peter and Bucky as if to calm them both down. “Alright, alright. It was an accident. The Kin put the whammy on you, Buck.” He knelt in front of Peter and clasped his shoulders, blue eyes full of concern. “Are you ok, Peter?”

Peter’s neck heated up. “I’m—yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he stammered. “What were those guys, though, seriously? They weren’t human.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Steve said. “Sorry, kid.”

Kid, huh? The heat went up a few more degrees, as embarrassment morphed into anger. Steve had the most patronizing look ever on his face.

“Does Tony know you’re in New York?” Peter asked sharply.

Steve’s face froze into an expression both resigned and unyielding. “Go home, kid. I appreciate you trying to help, but frankly, this is above your pay grade.”

Peter clenched his teeth. His eyes shot to Bucky, who watched him with an inscrutable look. No help there.

Peter raised his hands in surrender. “Fine. OK. Fine. I’m out.” He turned and stalked away. “You’re welcome, by the way,” he said loudly, without turning around. “Cause you were doing a great job, and all, getting totally mind-whacked by those dudes.”

Neither of them answered him, and that was fine, too. He didn’t care what Steve Rogers thought about him. He’d just saved their asses.

That was gratitude, for you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really happy to be getting Peter out and about again. I deeply appreciate every kudos, comment, bookmark or subscription. It means a ton to me that other folks are interested in this story. 
> 
> This is kinda what I was afraid of...I can’t do a proper recovery and growing-into-lovers story without a huge-ass plot to back it up 😅. Amon, Creed, and the Boss are my own characters from a book I wrote. I love those bad boys with all my heart and plopping them into the MCU gives me a happy. 
> 
> Some fun stuff coming up next chapter. As always, I love to chat and am available on Tumblr. I love to know your impressions as you read along.


	8. A Dash of Smut, a Dollop of Angst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter discovers a kink. Tony continues to suck at feelings.

Tony was going to be supportive. He was going to praise whatever Peter had done out there tonight, no matter how small. Hell, if he’d picked up something that had been dropped and returned it to the owner, Tony would get him a cake.

He had planned his exact reaction for when Peter got home.

 

—

 

“YOU DID _WHAT?”_ Tony shouted.

Mortimer danced enthusiastic circles around Peter, who was still dusted with snowfall. Mae stood in the doorway behind Tony, her face creased with concern.

“I didn’t know it was him at first!” Peter reached down to ruffle Mortimer’s ears.

“Peter,” Mae said, “that sounds really dangerous.”

Peter turned puppy-dog eyes to Mae, and Tony was _not_ having it.

“Mae, would you give us a few minutes? We need to have a talk. Superhero stuff. Take the dog with you. Work first, reunions later, thank you.” He held out a hand to escort her back through the door. Mae eyed Peter, then Tony as she took Mortimer by the collar.

 _“Go easy on him,”_ she whispered to Tony as she walked past.

Tony gave her a tight smile, fully aware that Peter could hear anything he whispered back, from this distance. Once the door shut, he turned to find Peter with hands in his pockets and a wary look on his face.

“Do you recall when we first met,” Tony said, “and I explained to you why Steve Rogers was dangerous?”

“Yeah, but I—”

“And _Barnes?”_ It took all his self control not to spit out the name. “These men are _criminals._ We’re not talking piddly street crime, either, we’re talking wanted by every peacekeeping agency in the _entire world.”_

“I know all that,” Peter began. Tony cut him off.

“Oh, do you, now? Alright, _Parker.”_

He hadn’t called Peter by his last name in the entire time the boy had lived here. It had the desired effect; Peter’s hands came out of his pockets and he straightened, shoulders going back.

Once Peter was suitably attentive, Tony clasped his own wrist, lifted his chin and looked down his nose at the boy. It was a posture that had produced results with even the most impudent of employees.

“Explain your reasoning. And keep in mind you’re not talking to your friend, right now: you are talking to your _boss._ So make it good.”

 

—

 

By the time Tony let him out of that room, Peter felt like he’d been holding up a four-seat debate team on his own. Tony hadn’t been that hard on him since—well. Ever.

After reassuring Mae that he was fine (and Mortimer that he was still alive and wasn’t going to leave without him ever again), Peter stepped into the shower to wash the streets off.

He couldn’t make himself feel bad about what he’d done. Bucky didn’t seem like a heartless serial killer the way Tony made him out to be. Peter knew he didn’t have all the information—Tony had said that repeatedly—but Tony didn’t, either.

Water verging on too hot pounded down over Peter’s shoulders, washing away the ache of the winter cold. No, he hadn’t told Tony everything, and that was probably why he got grilled for so long. Tony could tell he was holding something back. But Peter didn’t want to explain that when that one guy, Amon, had his face in Bucky’s neck, it had sounded like they were having sex. And he wasn’t _nearly_ suicidal enough to tell Tony that Bucky had kissed him. No. That was never, _ever_ going to come to light.

He became very aware of the water coursing over his skin as he remembered that kiss. He’d never kissed anyone but Eddie and Venom. And Bucky’s had been the first kiss, _ever,_ that didn’t make him feel sick inside. So, in that sense, maybe it _was_ his first kiss?

He licked water from his lips, trying to remember. Bucky’s mouth had tasted like velvety, chocolate porter, with something masculine underneath. Clean, and warm, and scratchy.

Peter ran his hands down his chest, took an unsteady breath and smoothed beads of water over his stomach.

Masturbation was tricky; he had to do a careful dance around his own thoughts. But that kiss had felt really good, and so did the shower…

…And Tony had been so _intense_ when Peter got home. So critical. There hadn’t been any kid gloves. He’d brilliantly deconstructed Peter’s arguments. Wrung him out until his brain felt fried from trying to think up defenses.

_Alright, Parker._

Peter’s eyes slipped shut. He opened his mouth to the shower’s spray and licked his wet lips, remembering the scrape of beard stubble. He gripped his cock and rolled the thumb of his other hand over his nipple.

 

_Bucky’s mouth warm on his, but at the shout of his own name, Bucky pulled away._

_“Barnes!!!”_

_“I’m so sorry!” Bucky gasped._

_And Tony Stark—no,_ Mr. _Stark, walked up in his Iron Man suit, mask pulled back to reveal his furious glare. He stalked toward Bucky, who jumped to his feet and backed up._

_“Get the hell out of here before I change my mind,” Mr. Stark snarled._

_Bucky turned and ran._

 

Peter licked his lips again, chasing that phantom taste. He pulled the foreskin over his cockhead and back. Friction and hunger and liquid heat.

 

_The suit opened and Mr. Stark stepped out in one smooth, practiced motion that was the epitome of cool. Peter got to his feet, tried to explain what had happened, but Mr. Stark kept advancing on him until he was backed into the wall. His chin jutted out and he looked down his nose at Peter. Stern. Intimidating. He took Peter’s jaw in hand, tilted his face up to look him over._

_Measuring him. Judging him._

_“Kiss me, Parker. And make it good.”_

_Peter leaned into Mr. Stark and pressed their mouths together. Taste of velvety, chocolate porter and clean masculinity. Mr. Stark made Peter control the kiss, made him work for it, work to earn a sound of pleasure from him, so when that groan finally came, Peter’s eyes rolled back. Mr. Stark’s trim goatee scratched his lips raw as the older man lost his reserve. He pressed Peter into the wall and ate into his mouth—_

 

Peter moaned loudly as the orgasm burst through him.

He bit the side of his fist to muffle the cries as his hand sped over his shaft. By the time the last sparks faded from behind his eyes, his limbs felt like Jell-O; he had to lean back against the tile for balance.

 _“Wow,”_ he whispered to no one.

It took a few minutes to catch his breath.

 

__

 

Peter was halfway asleep (with Mortimer sprawled over most of the bed so that Peter was relegated to the very edge) when he remembered something else strange about tonight.

He and Steve Rogers had only ever met the one time, nearly two years ago, and Peter had been in a mask. But tonight, the man had gripped his shoulders and called him by name.

How did Captain America know his name?

He must have been keeping tabs on Tony, Peter decided. There had been paparazzi, a few times, when they went out for walks together. Peter hadn’t really given it thought. 

It had been a mistake, getting involved in that fight without his mask on. He needed to be more careful.

 

—

  

Tony slouched at the kitchen island and nursed his coffee. Peter tried not to be too obvious in adoring the man while he fed Mortimer breakfast. Fresh-out-of-bed-Tony could barely enunciate, wore faded t-shirts instead of suit jackets, and his hair stuck out in all directions. He held onto his coffee mug like a comfort blanket and he grumbled at everything. It was one of the few times Peter got to see him with his guard down.

Mae had already gone to work. She’d left the news playing on the wall-sized TV projector. A car ad (or possibly an ad for adventure racing? Or maybe skydiving? It was unclear) blared rock music from the speakers.

“Friday,” Tony mumbled, “willya shut off the—”

He cut off so abruptly that Peter whirled around. Tony stared at the projected image, mouth hanging open like he’d been sucker-punched.

The car ad had morphed into a four-foot high image of Steve Rogers’ head. The caption read: “Cleared By United Nations.”

“Woah,” Peter breathed. The newscast jabbered something about a special called meeting of the UN, then the screen split to show other faces. He didn’t have time to read all the names, but he recognized them from the fight at the airport, years ago.

The metal wings guy. Hawkeye. Some derpy looking dude he didn’t recognize. The pretty lady who had shot crimson light out of her hands (Wanda? She didn’t look like a Wanda…) and—

Oh.

James Buchanan Barnes.

A light bulb flashed over Peter’s head. Except this light was red: an alarm, and it just kept strobing.

 _You’ll be cleared within the week,_ that Boss dude had said.

This could _not_ be good. Peter glanced back to Tony and confirmed that no, indeed it was not good at all. The man’s expression made him feel like his insides were falling down an elevator shaft.

“Tony?” he said tentatively.

Tony shoved away from the table and stood up so fast his chair toppled over. Without looking at Peter, he took long strides back to his room and slammed the door behind himself.

Peter eased through the door after him a minute later. He found Tony at the bathroom sink, beating his hair into place with a comb. His t-shirt lay strewn on the floor behind him. The arc reactor shone cold as a distant star in the center of his chest, surrounded by pale scars.

Tony’s eyes were focused somewhere past his mirror image. There were lines between his eyebrows that weren’t normally there. Tension at the sides of his eyes that shouldn’t exist. Peter walked up behind him and put a hesitant hand on his shoulder.

Tony tensed up

 

_whirled and grabbed Peter by the throat, threw him to the ground and fell on top of him, pinning him_

 

The hallucination came and was gone in a blink, but it left Peter shaking. Sue stepped in on cue to bring his heart rate back down while Peter grabbed a handful of his own pajama pants.

 _Soft. Cotton. A little warm. Fuzz at the seams._ He ticked off features of the fabric in his mind, frantic at first, then slower as his racing heart calmed down. “Grounding” was a tool Dr. Grey had given him, to help tie himself to reality when the flashbacks hit. Sue could bring him down, but sometimes the attacks would repeat if he didn’t find a quick anchor.

Tony looked at him, then. His eyes were still far away, yet somehow hyper-alert. He set down the comb he’d been using on himself like a weapon, turned around and gently touched Peter’s elbow, and this was _wrong,_ Peter couldn’t let this become about him, because it was Tony who needed help right now, and Tony had given him everything.

“They can’t hurt you,” Peter blurted. “I won’t let them.”

That haggard look on Tony’s face turned quizzical. He chuffed out a sound that was too hollow to be a laugh. Unclear if he was laughing off Peter’s ability to protect him, or his own ability to remain unharmed.

Not good enough.

Peter lifted his hands to Tony’s shoulders. Bare skin hit his palms like a jolt of electricity, but he wasn’t going to let himself stop.

He wrapped his arms around Tony’s neck and hugged him.

Scent of expensive cologne and fresh coffee. Underneath it, masculine heat still warm from sleep.

Skin...so much bare skin.

Peter kept his eyes wide open, fixing the room in his mind as he pulled Tony’s upper body tight against his chest.

_White towels with teal trim. Marble swirls in the counter._

He put his place markers on the room, on reality: dozens of connections like a spiderweb to keep him tethered. He couldn’t break down, not now. Tony needed him.

Slowly, so slowly, Tony’s arms wrapped around him. The man leaned down so Peter didn’t have to stretch so much. Lifted one hand to stroke Peter’s hair.

Tony let out a shaky breath when Peter stroked his hair in return. Peter was just starting to relax into the embrace when he got the “letting go” squeeze. He let Tony pull back, tried not to notice the dark curls of hair on his chest and stomach, or the way his muscles bulged under the skin: features he both admired and feared beyond all reason.

Tony reached up and cupped Peter’s face in both hands. His eyes weren’t as tense as a minute ago, but still so raw that Peter wanted to go and smash the TV projector so it could never hurt him again.

Callused thumbs stroked his cheeks. A gentle, sad smile pulled at Tony’s mouth, but his gaze dropped and the smile fell after it.

His walls went up like the Iron Man suit jumping onto his body. He patted Peter on the shoulder, already focused on something inside himself.

“I need to get dressed.”

Peter swallowed as Tony turned away. “Is there anything I can help with?”

“No. You do your thing. I’ll be out today.” Tony brushed past him and went to the bedroom, to the huge walk-in closet, without another word.

Peter was dismissed.

 

—-

 

Fury’s new headquarters were a pale shadow compared to the old, but maybe the paranoid old goat liked it that way.

From the outside, the building was your typical high rise. Inside, it looked like a law firm. Tony’s sunglasses gave him information as he strode through the revolving door. There were security cameras everywhere. The innocuous-looking people who milled about the lobby were all armed beneath their tailored suits.

Tony texted Fury as he stepped into the elevator: _here. Floor?_

Fury texted back: _i know_

That was all. Tony scowled. “What _floor,”_ he grumbled, about to text that back when the elevator started moving on its own.

Moving downward. According to the numbered buttons on the wall, he was already on the lowermost floor. The electronic floor display above the doors showed the flashing numbers “88.”

The elevator stopped after a solid minute’s descent. The doors parted to reveal Nick Fury himself, _pirate chic_ with his eye patch and trademark black trenchcoat, framed by a concrete lair that was lit with harsh fluorescents.

“I _love_ what you’ve done with the place. Is this where you perform autopsies?” The humor fell flat from Tony’s lips as he stepped out of the elevator.

“On occasion,” Fury deadpanned. “Follow me.”

Their footsteps were loud in the silent corridor. Gone was the bustle of the above-ground facade. Everything down here was darkness, and silence, and one closed door after another. Tony flipped his glasses to infrared, but there were no heat signatures around other than Fury’s.

“So. Balls deep in the UN now, are you? How’s that going?” Tony hadn’t meant it to come out so aggressive, but now that it was out, he saw no reason to soften it.

Fury gave a brief glance over his shoulder. “We have twenty-three known planets that have been overrun by symbiotes. Two, now, in our galaxy, since the first time we spoke of it. They scout a planet for a couple weeks, maybe a couple years. Then the hive moves in and destroys it like locusts. Our allies call their race the ‘klyntar.’”

“Your ‘allies’ attacked _my_ boy last night,” Tony snarled.

Fury stopped in his tracks and turned around, his serious look garnished by a raised eyebrow. “I heard. That’s part of why we need you in on this, Tony. I’d say the kin are less deadly to us than our enemies, but only because it’s convenient for them.”

“And yet, _you_ brought them here. Didn’t you?”

Fury’s chin lifted. “I did not. They’ve been around Earth as long as we have. The difference is, they have other places they can go when the klyntar invade. We don’t.”

Tony grunted. “What did you promise them in exchange for help?”

“I would like nothing more than to tell you everything I know,” Fury began, but Tony cut him off with a cynical laugh.

“Sorry—oh, wait, no I’m not. I call bullshit. You love your secrets. Does your own mom even know your phone number, or do you have a secret drop-box where she can leave you birthday cards?”

“She had me upgrade it to a pneumatic tube system in the nineties,” Fury said. “And if you knew _half_ the things I know, you’d never sleep again.”

Tony snorted.

“I have a full debriefing ready for you,” Fury continued. “I have a plan, I have allies, and I have a team, but it isn’t complete. It won’t be complete until _you’re_ on it.”

Foreboding hollowed out a space in Tony’s gut. “Your team,” he began.

“Wants to keep the world safe from what you destroyed in Eddie Brock’s apartment,” Fury cut him off. When he said it like that, there was no argument that didn’t make Tony sound like a douchebag. Which he should’ve been used to, by now, but the blatant manipulation left resentment stewing on the back of his tongue.

Fury watched his face and seemed to find a cue there. He stepped to the side, reaching to open the door he’d stopped in front of. He pushed the door inward.

The room was lined with plain, gray tables, plastic chairs, and a single laptop, its screen dark.

Steve Rogers sat facing the door, elbows on his knees and hands clasped. He looked up, forehead knotted, as the door swung open.

He looked more beaten down than Tony remembered. Maybe it was just the effect of the new beard and longer hair, or maybe that he was dressed all in black, a stark contrast to his prior penchant for red, white, and blue.

They stared at each other for a few breaths. Tony felt paralyzed.

“If you can walk into this room and make some kind of peace,” Fury said, “I’ll have you debriefed right away. If you _can’t_ do this, I’m gonna have to move forward with what I have. You got a lot of friends on this team that want you in it. Frankly, I’m damn sick of hearing about it.

“They’re right, though. We need you. I’m not entirely sure we can pull this off without you.”

 

—

 

Deathly silence reigned after Fury shut the door behind Tony. He wouldn’t be surprised if the old bastard had it locked from the outside. A horrible minute passed, him and Steve just looking at each other.

“I, ah...I’ve never been to space,” Steve said, voice too loud in the stale, underground air. “One of the first things I ever said to you was that you only fight for yourself. And then you flew a nuke through a wormhole and proved me wrong, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d said. But I never took it back.”

Tony just stared at him. His jaw was clenched so tight, he wasn’t sure he _could_ speak. Steve licked his lips and went on.

“It was years after that, when SHIELD went down, I found out the car crash wasn’t an accident.” He glared upward, blue eyes hot with emotion. “Hydra took the credit, but I had _no_ other information than that. I had no resolution for you. Nothing.” He opened his hands, imploring. “I couldn’t bring that up twenty years after the fact and cut you back open. Hydra was _dead,_ you had moved on—”

“Hydra wasn’t dead.” Tony’s voice came out choked. “You’ve got the murderer in bed with you right now.”

Silence. Steve’s lips thinned; his fingers curled back into his palms.

It was a low blow. Barnes had been tortured and brainwashed; he’d been worse than a prisoner, and Tony _knew_ all of that. He had spent a full year and millions of dollars (mostly in bribes) tracking down the very device Pierce had used to do the brain wipes. He’d taken it apart. Studied it. Learned how it worked, because he had to _know,_ and he did. Barnes had been nothing but a remote control robot for Hydra.

But somewhere between his brain and his heart, that information kept getting lost.

“I know it’s too late,” Steve said. There was real pain in his eyes, but again, it didn’t compute. “I know it is. And I betrayed your trust.”

 _“You people must really be desperate,”_ Tony rasped. The words burned his throat. He wanted to say more, accusations that had etched familiar grooves in his mind the last couple of years, but if he opened that floodgate he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop screaming.

“I’ve _been_ desperate, Tony. I’ve been…” Steve cut off, looked to his hands like he was gathering strength, “...I’ve stayed close whenever possible. Just in case you needed me. For anything.” He looked up, and Peter’s name was loud in the silence.

Christ. This was agony.

“Fine. Whatever. I’m in. Can we skip to the debriefing phase?”

Steve’s forehead creased. His lips parted, but nothing came out. He stared as Tony backed toward the door.

“Debrief,” Tony repeated. “Fury. Gonna,” he pointed over his shoulder to finish the thought.

He tried the door handle. It was unlocked. His breath came out in a burst.

_“Oh thank god.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoy the update. Writing Fury & Tony makes me grin. As always, I would love to know what you think. I could say a million things about why I wrote this the way I did, but my hope is that it speaks for itself.
> 
>  
> 
> —-7/21/19 been very busy but am working on the next chap. Thx for understanding!

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my AO3 liberry:
> 
> The prequel to Peter Gets Rescued is “Captured” on my AO3, but I can’t warn enough, it is VERY VERY DARK and heartbreaking, and you should only read if you enjoy dark non-con stories. Basically it’s everything that happened to Peter before the rescue. 
> 
> A Peter / Superior Iron Man / MCU Tony Stark fic (it's just porn) (dubcon): **[The Darkness In Me](http://archiveofourown.org/works/19244611)**
> 
> A short Stucky fic: **[At the Altar of Vormir](http://archiveofourown.org/works/19046338)**  
>  A short Torture Tuesday prompt featuring Victor/Logan: [ **Reconditioning**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/18698554)
> 
> An original novel (has noncon): [**Eternity Rising**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19401694/chapters/46171105)
> 
> Very sexplicit dubcon/noncon Victor Creed/Logan:
> 
>   1. [**Blood is Forever**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/17477456)
>   2. **[Poison](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17646176/chapters/41611919)**
> 

> 
> An epic, dark Wolverine adventure with tons of consensual, rough sex, older man/younger man, angst, PTSD, and eventual happy ending:
> 
>   1. [**Part 1 Ghost on the Highway**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17245922/chapters/40556258)
>   2. **[Part 2 Back into the Fray](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17258645/chapters/40585418)**
> 



End file.
